On Mon, Apr 27, 2015 at 2:13 PM, Joerg Schilling Joerg.Schilling@fokus.fraunhofer.de wrote:
Les Mikesell lesmikesell@gmail.com wrote:
There was no court case, but VERITAS published a modifed version of gtar where additional code was added by binary only libraries from VERITAS. The FSF did never try to discuss this is public even though everybody did know about the existence. As long as the FSF does not try to sue VERITAS, we are safe - regardless what intentional nonsense you can read on the FSF webpages.
I just remembered a counterpoint to this. Back in the Windows 3.0 days when windows had no tcp networking of its own, I put together a DOS binary built from gnutar and the wattcp stack so you could back up a windows or dos box to a unix system via rsh. And when I tried to give it away I was contacted and told that I couldn't distribute it because even though wattcp was distributed in source, it had other conflicts with the GPL. As a side effect of getting it to build on a DOS compiler, I prototyped the tar code and contributed that and some bugfixes. Someone else's version was accepted instead but at least my name is still in a comment somewhere. Probably the only thing still being distributed...