> Please change the licensing to the Artistic License. It is a much
> nicer license, it protects Blitz from being "stolen" and it allows
> commercial development of the library which I think we will all
> benefit from.
The Artistic License contains more holes than swiss cheese; please
do not use it. It is *much* worse than the (L)GPL from a legal
standpoint.
Strictly speaking, you are correct: to reproduce the exact binary
that somebody ships (bugs and all :-), proper version control and
configuration management is necessary. But it gets worse than that:
reproducing that exact binary may require the identical processor,
stepping number, RAM, etc. Some compilers have optimizers that
may perform varying amounts of optimization based upon available
memory, load, etc. Profiling compilers (Sun, etc.) can make it
nearly impossible to reproduce the exact binary, even on the same
machine, running the same software, unless the profiling information
for each module is also versioned.
Unfortunately, there are packages that have been "stranded" by
insufficient attention to configuration management. But we live in the
real world. What the license effectively requires is a good-faith
effort.
Bill Rugolsky
rugolsky@ead.dsa.com
DISCLAIMER: I'm no lawyer. If you care about these issues, consult one.
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