Licensing and technical issues with a Wine package that includes the Mozilla ActiveX Control

On 11/27/05, Mike Hearn <mike at plan99.net> wrote:
> On Thu, 24 Nov 2005 20:08:04 +0100, Stephan Hermann wrote:
> > So do you think it would be a good idea to put Putty.exe into the wine
> > package, because it's opensource?
>
> Sure, I don't see any reason why something like Putty.exe couldn't be put
> into Ubuntu if it worked with Wine (IIRC it does), or even included with
> Wine itself if upstream had a use for it. I don't see why it'd be useful
> on Linux but you never know.

Because we must be able to support it. In order to be able to support
a software package, we must be able to rebuild it from source. A
'putty.exe' would have to be compiled under windows, which we cannot
do.

> > Do you think it's wise, to package windows firefox together with wine, because
> > it's opensource?
> That may become a technical necessity in future, so watch your
> examples closely.
I really don't think you want to redistribute unmaintainable binaries
from foreign operating systems. Well, in fact, we (as in
ubuntu-developers) don't.

> > Thinking about userland windows applications/libraries in a wine package, I,
> > as packager would remove them. They don't belong to the original source
> > package named wine.
>
> You are *AGAIN* stating you would interfere with upstream technical
> decisions for no good reason other than "I don't like it". That is
> unacceptable. It's not your place, nor the distributions, to override
> upstream decisions in that way.

He was perhaps a bit harsh, but please understand our point: We
require all software we ship in main and universe to be compilable
from source. (Okay, there are very few exceptions in multiverse, but
they are not free software).

--
regards,
    Reinhard