On Fri, Aug 15, 2014 at 4:28 AM, Ian Malone ibmalone@gmail.com wrote:
Does patching software legally make it a fork?
I'm not aware of any legal definition of a fork (IANAL etc.). There are derivatives of copyrighted material, which open source licenses allow (if they don't they're not usually regarded as open source). Your correspondent is right, you have a fork in that the source they are using is no longer the upstream, it may be a trivial patch (and a trivial fork), but they're making a point about the difficulty of maintaining this in what is effectively a distro (many packages and sources) and that upstream is the best place for patches. Exactly where people draw the line in patches that haven't made it into upstream will vary between projects (you'll find many Fedora srpms that contain patches), if it's not a critical one for many people (e.g. heartbleed) then I wouldn't be surprised if they wait for the patch to come in from upstream rather than patch it in the build, especially if one person is looking after hundreds of packages. In the meantime there is absolutely nothing stopping you from applying a patch locally.
Well I already submitted it upstream but I have no intention of waiting for it. While I really like cmake as a product and much prefer it to autotools, I've seen bugs with trivial fixes sit for years in their bug tracker.
I did patch my local install so I was never worried about waiting for the fix from a practical point of view, I'm more worried about other users that may run into the same problem.
Thanks, Richard