Date: Mon, 29 Jan 1996 15:16:49 +1030 (CST) From: Michael Smith <msmith@atrad.adelaide.edu.au> To: nate@sri.MT.net (Nate Williams) Cc: msmith@atrad.adelaide.edu.au, nate@sri.MT.net, Hackers@freebsd.org Subject: Unzip for package tools (was re: FBSD 2.1) Message-ID: <199601290446.PAA09422@genesis.atrad.adelaide.edu.au> In-Reply-To: <199601170501.WAA07146@rocky.sri.MT.net> from "Nate Williams" at Jan 16, 96 10:01:07 pm
next in thread | previous in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
Nate Williams stands accused of saying: > > Actually, you can't modify the code and unless you promise to distribute > the source code of the original code. You *must* provide source code to > the software (this is GPL ish) Just after receiving this, I sent a query to the InfoZip people, seeing as it's their code anyway. I just received this reply, which I quote in full (headers pruned): From: Cave Newt <roe2@midway.uchicago.edu> To: Zip-Bugs@WKUVX1.WKU.EDU, msmith@atrad.adelaide.edu.au Subject: Re: Use of Info-Zip code in FreeBSD tools? Mike, > Greetings to the policy people; I have a question that you're most > likely to be best placed to answer. Greetings, and apologies for not getting back to you sooner. The tide of incoming e-mail is rising... > Currently, it is assumed that code from at least unzip, and possibly > zip as well would be modified to produce a library providing a number > of high-level primitive operations on zipfiles. The current UnZip beta has a library version (shared library in Linux, since that's what I use), so it should be pretty straightforward. Zip, on the other hand, has no library version to date. > Under what terms would the FreeBSD project, and subsequent posessors > of this code, be allowed to redistribute it? > There appear to be a few wrinkles (The third and fourth section of > the S.H. Smith copyright), and the implications of the third FAQ > question on people shipping binary-only versions of FreeBSD. The S.H.Smith copyright should pretty much cease to be an issue in the coming release; the only remaining code that has not been rewritten is in unreduce.c, and by default that's no longer used. (Reducing was only used in the first beta of PKZIP.) In fact, since you're creating the zipfiles, you can take the currently released public code and just leave out unreduce.c and unshrink.c (and explode.c, for that matter); Zip 2.x only uses the deflate algorithm for compression. The binary-only issue is a little stickier; we really want people to be able to get their hands on our code. If you can essentially guarantee that everyone who receives the FreeBSD distribution will have Internet access (which is the case with OS/2 Warp via the Internet Access Kit), then it's sufficient to point at our WWW and/or ftp sites. Otherwise the distributor(s) should be prepared to mail out a floppy for a minimal charge if requested, assuming there's absolutely no room on the CD or whatever for another meg of source archives. (To our knowledge, no one ever makes such a request, but you never know.) If this is really going to be a problem, we can talk about it some more; we try to facilitate such things whenever possible. -- Greg Roelofs "Name an animal that's small and fuzzy." "Mold." newt@uchicago.edu or http://quest.jpl.nasa.gov/Info-ZIP/people/greg/ ... As far as I can see, this answers most of the qualms that were raised about using InfoZip source in the package tools. The only possible scenario I can see causing problems would be someone distributing a binary-only version of FreeBSD with all of the networking code removed but still keeping the package tools. I'd say that was pretty unlikely 8) -- ]] Mike Smith, Software Engineer msmith@atrad.adelaide.edu.au [[ ]] Genesis Software genesis@atrad.adelaide.edu.au [[ ]] High-speed data acquisition and (GSM mobile) 0411-222-496 [[ ]] realtime instrument control (ph/fax) +61-8-267-3039 [[ ]] "wherever you go, there you are" - Buckaroo Banzai [[
Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?199601290446.PAA09422>