On 05-04-2012 17:52, Joseph Rushton Wakeling wrote:
On 04/04/12 15:43, Joseph Rushton Wakeling wrote:
To see why it matters, imagine a corporate entity releasing a large,
complex
piece of software where the code was under a free licence but the
build system
was proprietary and internal to the company. It'd be a major block to
practically enjoying the licence freedoms.
I should probably be more cautious there and say build _script_ rather
than build _system_; I'm not sure the GPL legally forbids you releasing
a program that builds using (say) a proprietary equivalent of the
Autotools, so long as the build script itself is present.
In that case, that doesn't stop Waf though - your Waf build script is
just in plain source form while Waf itself (which runs the script) is in
compressed form.
But a non-free build system would almost certainly be a block to
inclusion in many of the major Linux distributions.
--
- Alex
