GNU Emacs compiling/executable.

[Peter S. Shenkin]

In a previous posting, Bob Bruccoleri suggests that SGI should distrubute
GNU software as part of 4Dgifts.  Elsewhere Vernon Schreyer suggests reasons
SGI might not like to do this.

Actually, SGI personnel have been extremely helpful to those attempting
to port GNU software to Iris workstations, by means of their participation
in this Newsgroup, and for me, getting source and/or binaries from brl
is good enough.

But there's also another alternative:  namely, the IRIS software exchange.
If anyone wanted to distribute sources plus binaries for any combination
of the gnu packages using this mechanism, it would be within the letter
and spirit of the gnu copyright.  I don't know the mechanism for getting
it onto Monica's release tape, but perhaps Monica or someone else at SGI
could comment on this.

The "Prologue" to the Iris Software Exchange Catalog states that
"... Software... are [sic] considered to be copyrighted by the auther... No
commitments as to functionality or support can be made... The authors and
SGI cooperate to ensure that each program... contains Source code, makefile,
man page, README."  Some of the software is distributed directly from
author to clients, and some is distributed by SGI at a cost of $100 per
cartridge.

The advantage of this form of distribution is that a user would be fairly
certain of receiving code patched to work on Irises.  Of course, the
question still remains, who's going to do the patching, or the gathering
of patches, and a testing to make sure things work.

	-P.
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Peter S. Shenkin, Department of Chemistry, Barnard College, New York, NY  10027
(212)854-1418  shenkin at cunixf.cc.columbia.edu(Internet)  shenkin at cunixf(Bitnet)
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