[License-discuss] [Non-DoD Source] Re: Discussion: AGPL and Open Source Definition conflict

[Florian Weimer]

* Cem F. Karan:

> The ELF idea sounds interesting, but what about other binary
> containers, e.g. mach-o?

I don't know anything about mach-o, sorry.  Well, I know that some of
the files share their magic number with Java class files, but that's
it.

> That said, I for one would find it *highly* amusing if gcc/clang added
> a switch to embed the complete project into the binary (or even a git
> bundle, so you can do a pull from an executable).

It's not unreasonable to do this for link-time optimization purposes.
Source code is more compact than compiler IR and also stable across
minor (and hopefully) major versions of the compiler.  But that would
only apply to code that can be re-linked.

That being said, there is a huge difference in low-evel debugging on
Fedora and downstreams, where debugging information and source code is
readily available, and the reset.  So there is something to be said
for shipping corresponding source code that was actually compiled, and
not just upstream tarballs plus downstream patches.