Static linking considered harmful

[Andrew Haley]

Erik LaBianca writes:

 > Beyond scientific computing, application developers (both open
 > source and commercial) need better ways to distribute their code in
 > a runnable (aka binary) form. Just trying to find an mp3 player
 > that would work on centos4 ended up taking me the better part of 4
 > hours since there is no livna for rhel4, and nobody packages for
 > it. If developers had an easy way to provide me with an
 > lsb-compatible rpm I could have tried a whole raft of packages and
 > picked one I liked, instead of being stuck with the first one that
 > would compile and run correctly.

Well, hold on: that problem is caused by software patents, not by
packaging issues.  Let's point the finger in the right direction, eh?

Andrew.