Re: gEDA-user: Footprint with Unusual Pads

[DJ Delorie <dj@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

> Since it's GPL, we have to delete the use of M4 entirely to delete
> it in a user's source build process.

IANAL but one could consider that M4 is a "standard part of the
operating system" that the user just doesn't choose to install most of
the time.  The "operating system" in this case being cygwin, which has
m4 (when installed) but most *users* of geda won't have installed it,
just like they probably won't have installed gcc, which is also needed
for the build, if then use pre-built geda binaries.

This is completely different than something the users *can't* install,
which would violate the GPL.  The user always has the choice of not
installing some tool if they don't want it and don't need it.

This is the same issue as needing gcc, make, ld, etc.  I asked RMS
about this a long time ago, when I was developing DJGPP, and they
modified the GPL to include the standard development tools in the "os"
exceptions clause (DJGPP wasn't part of MS-DOS but you can't expect
people using it to have to give DJGPP to every user of, say, Quake 1)


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