Installshield 6 (inter-proc) patches

[Francois Gouget]

On Thu, 20 Dec 2001, Patrik Stridvall wrote:

> > Patrik Stridvall <ps at leissner.se> writes:
> > 
> > > But why should I do that?
> > > I can for example write a script that download Wine for the 
> > end user user
> > > and apply the patch automatically.
> > 
> > The patch would be considered a derivative work, so distributing it
> > would also violate the LGPL.
> 
> That again is dependent of the doctrine of derived work have any
> meaning since the patch is written by me and only contains my work.
[... irrelevant first amendment stufff...]
> Note by patch I do not nessarily mean a patch like (diff -u) that contains
> the (LGPL:ed) context of the patch. An "ed-script" or whatever
> similar will do.

   I see exactly what you mean. You mean a binary patch that says
things like:
 * delete bytes 2294 to 2297
 * replace bytes 38455 to 39345 with "...."
 * insert "...." at offset 41753

   Such a patch is very specific to a given source version but does not
include any of the original source.

   Well, if you can legally use such a patch to work-around the LGPL
license, then you can use it to get past *any* license: GPL, AFPL, MS
shared-source, .... whatever. And this is not only true of source files,
this is also true of binary files: you can apply such a patch to
executables, libraries, mp3s, mpegs, ...

   This has already been done and the author very quickly got into hot
water. IIRC it was less that two years ago, about a GPL game and an
individual who published a mod as a patch to the game binaries but
refused to publish his source. I'm not sure how it ended. You can
probably research it in your copious amounts of spare time, I think
there was an article on it on Slashdot at the time.
   But I can assure you that no company in a 'developped' country would
try such a thing. If such a stunt were recognized as legal then it would
spell the end of copyright of all electronic forms of songs, movies,
books, ... You can be sure that the RIAA, MPAA and all the other
entertainment companies in the world out would never allow such a
thing... and for once I say that they would be right.


--
Francois Gouget         fgouget at free.fr        http://fgouget.free.fr/
            "Lotto: A tax on people who are bad at math." -- unknown
          "Windows: Microsoft's tax on computer illiterates." -- WE7U