Re: No sources for lisp/international/uni-*.el?

[Ulrich Mueller]

>>>>> On Tue, 09 Aug 2011, Andreas Röhler wrote:

> Am 09.08.2011 03:44, schrieb Richard Stallman:
>> >  Hm, for example lisp/international/uni-name.el doesn't look like
>> >  "the preferred form of the work for making modifications to it".
>> >  The file rather has the appearence of line noise. ;-)
>> 
>> Maybe that memory concerned some other files.  I said I might be
>> wrong.
>> 
>> Since these files are not under the GPL, we are not leading anyone
>> to violate the GPL. So there is no legal issue, but there remains
>> an ethical issue: is it wrong for a release to contain generated
>> files made from sources that are distributed separately?

> In case you answer "yes", you must include the gcc-sources as well.

The difference between gcc and unidata-gen.el is that the former is a
general-purpose tool that normally is installed on your system, while
the latter is not.

And (what a surprise ;-) the GPL has a clause that covers that:

# The "Corresponding Source" [...] does not include the work's System
# Libraries, or general-purpose tools or generally available free
# programs which are used unmodified in performing those activities
# but which are not part of the work.

For UnicodeData.txt one could even argue that it falls into this
category because it's freely available and used unmodified (it's also
part of the "miscfiles" package [1] that I believe is installed on
most GNU/Linux systems).

However, the same is not true for the corresponding build tools (like
unidata-gen.el or biditype.awk) which are specific to Emacs.

Ulrich

[1] <http://www.gnu.org/software/miscfiles/>