Les Mikesell <lesmikesell at gmail.com> wrote: > On Mon, Apr 27, 2015 at 2:13 PM, Joerg Schilling > <Joerg.Schilling at fokus.fraunhofer.de> wrote: > > Les Mikesell <lesmikesell at 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 If you had the wattcp stack in a separate library and if you did make the needed changes for integration in the gtar source, this was fully legal. I know that the FSF frequently tries to ask people to do things that are not on a legal base. They however know that they cannot go on trial with this... Jörg -- EMail:joerg at schily.net (home) Jörg Schilling D-13353 Berlin joerg.schilling at fokus.fraunhofer.de (work) Blog: http://schily.blogspot.com/ URL: http://cdrecord.org/private/ http://sourceforge.net/projects/schilytools/files/'