[IAEP] etoys now available in Debian's non-free repository

[Jonas Smedegaard]

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On Fri, Jun 27, 2008 at 10:17:54AM +0200, Antoine van Gelder wrote:
>> The analogy doesn't work. If I have C, I'll send the C. I have friends
>> who used to write APL and ship Ada as source, and their military
>> customers never complained. If the generated C is well-structured and
>> has the comments from the Smalltalk embedded, so that people can
>> understand it, what's the problem?
>
>
> What happens if I  make my changes to that generated C and then try to  
> submit those changes to the generated code back to the Squeak project?
>
> I think this is what Yoshiki means when he says:
>
>
>> if you send them C that's generated and call that your source, it's  
>> the same
>> thing as writing your code in C and sending assembler as your 'source'
>> (assuming there was a cpu independant assembler)
>
>
> Free software is also the freedom to develop code with the source you  
> are supposed to have access to.

...and the deroute through C does not conflict with that freedom.

The freedom to develop based on the provided source is what we call 
forking.

You are talking about the ability to give back to the original 
community, which is a different thing.

If I develop based on the source provided by Linus Torvalds (the Linux 
kernel) and want to give back to the original community my changes, then 
they will get rejected if I do not follow their coding style and their 
way of commiting patches.

If I understand correctly, the Squeak community accepts patches 
generated from their binary images.

So the real question is, if images built from C sources can generate 
patches acceptable by the Squeak community.


I honestly do expect Debian to approve Squeak if such C decompiler is 
invented.

And I imagine the Squeak community will support it too, if recompiled 
code generates images workable with them (rather than working as a 
slight fork).


Hope I made sense here - I am _very_ new to the Squeak concepts, 
following these discussions as part of my packaging Sugar software 
officially for Debian.


Kind regards,

  - Jonas

- -- 
* Jonas Smedegaard - idealist og Internet-arkitekt
* Tlf.: +45 40843136  Website: http://dr.jones.dk/

  - Enden er nær: http://www.shibumi.org/eoti.htm
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