Forgive me if the question is stupid (I'm tired). Maybe someone can help me out. I have seen that some software is not hosting binaries but only the source code due to some 'legal issues'. I'm kind of curious as to what this is. Has it something to do with patents? In that case, what's the difference (legally) between source and binaries? I would imagine it's something with the EU's infamous software patents but I found no reference on this.

I tried googling a bit, but I'm none the wiser. A good reference explaining it all would be nice

Oh, and this is asked out of curiosity. I know it's easy to compile from source, it's not a problem. But one can still wonder...

It is hard to say exactly what the legal issue is without a specific example, but I'll do my best to clear up some of the issue.

Take Red Hat Enterprise Linux Version 3.

If you go the RedHat ftp site you can go into a directory and download all the src.rpm's for every package contain in RHEL3. You cannot download the binary rpm's. RedHat is following the letter of the law here, and providing the source for all the GPL'd, LGPL'd, and other OSS they are using. However, at the same time they don't want you to be able to use there OS easily without paying them for it (thus they don't give you an installer or the binaries).

As an owner of RHEL3 I could not legally post the binary rpm's or the installer without violated my license with RedHat... However, I can put all the source rpm's I feel like up on my personally ftp site for all to download, since the GPL fully allows that.

Of course... that is just one situation of legality that comes to mind, I suppose there could be others too.

What about for example XviD or ffmpeg?