On 29 March 2011 10:53, Steve Langasek steve.langasek@linaro.org wrote:
Hi Konstantinos,
There must be some misunderstanding here; no license that prohibited distribution of binaries built from modified source would be considered a Free Software license, and zlib is certainly considered free. :)
Yes, you're right, the problem is that a modified zlib would have to be clearly marked as different -ie the package name would have to be different. This would be easily solved by means of a Provides: field, but I'm unsure if the differentiation also should include the libz.so filename. I was probably wrong in my license interpretation in 2005, but I seem to remember it was something like that that basically made me stop my work in vectorizing zlib :)
I'd love to be corrected if it meant having a NEON-optimized zlib in 2011 :)
The only relevant requirements in the license (according to /usr/share/doc/zlib1g/copyright) are:
1. The origin of this software must not be misrepresented; you must not claim that you wrote the original software. If you use this software in a product, an acknowledgment in the product documentation would be appreciated but is not required. 2. Altered source versions must be plainly marked as such, and must not be misrepresented as being the original software.
Yes, 2 is the problem, I think this was interpreted as having to rename the package and possibly the .so name.
Are you looking at a different zlib license than this one?
No, it's the same.
Konstantinos