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

[Karan, Cem F CIV USARMY CCDC ARL (USA)]

>From: John Cowan <cowan at ccil.org> 
>Sent: Tuesday, September 24, 2019 3:32 PM
>
>>On Tue, Sep 24, 2019 at 2:46 PM Florian Weimer <mailto:fw at deneb.enyo.de < Caution-mailto:fw at deneb.enyo.de > > wrote:
>>
>>A useful implementation for C and C++ looks rather involved due to the preprocessor. 
>
>I was thinking of something much simpler, like putting one of these, or something like them, in the Makefile immediately after the link step:
>
>elftar r $@ $INCLUDE_FILES $SRC_FILES $ESSENTIAL_FILES
>
>elftar r $@ $(find ../src ../include -name '*.[ch]')
>
>Then at the other end the user runs "elftar x /usr/local/bin/foo', and its source and include directories are reconstituted for them. 

This is very similar to what I was thinking, although I did find out that you can create a filesystem within a file (at least on linux), so in theory you can mount the section of the executable as a read-only filesystem.  See https://linuxconfig.org/how-to-create-a-file-based-filesystem-using-dd-command-on-linux and https://askubuntu.com/questions/85977/how-do-i-create-a-file-and-mount-it-as-a-filesystem for more details.  This would save you the step of 'elftar -x', and could also lead to a new standard mount point under linux where the source for a binary is automatically mounted ('/source' anyone?).

I also did a quick experiment to see how large a 'big' project would be.  The linux sources take up a little over 1 GiB uncompressed, and a little over 100 MiB when run through 'tar -cvJf'.  It would be interesting to see how much it increased the size of binaries over ordinary stripped binaries on average.  If it was a small enough percentage, then this could be a new recommended practice.


Thanks,
Cem Karan

---
Other than quoted laws, regulations or officially published policies, the views expressed herein are not intended to be used as an authoritative state of the law nor do they reflect official positions of the U.S. Army, Department of Defense or U.S. Government.