[M3devel] licensing (gcc patches)

[hendrik at topoi.pooq.com]

On Mon, Jul 05, 2010 at 07:39:44AM +0000, Jay K wrote:
> 
>  > Of course any code we *add* at this point can be dual-licensed, letting 
> I find "dual license" confusing.

Each licence gives potential clients certain rights.  If they follow 
the restrictions in either licence, they have the privileges granted by 
that licence.  If they follow the restrictions of both, they have the 
privileges granted by both.

If all of out new code were to be dual-licensed, we'd be compatible with 
the SRC licence (pretty easy to be), and our new code could be taken by 
anyone and used and redistributed under the GPL on its own.  Whether it 
would be useful on its own is another question.

GPL becomes restrictive is when you don't have the permission of all the 
copyright holders to change licenses.  As in our case, where we, as far 
as I can tell, can't get it from SRC, perhaps only because they just 
don't care at all about the matter any more.

> 
> I like the BSD way, esp. OpenBSD way.Besides being "liberal", they 
> also significantly favor "simplicity".  Simple, short, clear, and also 
> widely used. I'm talking about the license, not the code.That is, if 
> you come up with a new license, and claim it is liberal, but it takes 
> too muchtime/effort/money/lawyer to read and interpret, then they 
> reject it.They reject for example Apache 2.x. Thus they stick with 
> Apache 1.x.I kind of wish they wouldn't stick with Apache 1.x, it 
> seems "dangerous" to lingerback on "old" versions, but I understand 
> the reason.I don't know if they stuck with gcc 3.x to avoid bloat or 
> to avoid GPL 3.
> 
> I don't think we have a choice in the licensing of what we add, 
> parse.c in particular. I suspect parts of it are copied from the GPL 
> gcc C front end. That is ok.

And that restricts us from distributing parse.c other than under the 
GPL.  We can't dual-licence that bit.  Is parse.c part of our modified 
gcc back end?  If so, yes, that is OK.

-- hendrik