[M3devel] licensing (gcc patches)

[Jay K]

Yes parse.c is a new file added to gcc and contains the bulk of our work on gcc.
There are some other small files and small diffs, but parse.c is really it.

parse.c: the name seems wrong, but if you consider that from gcc's point of view,
we are a front end, then it makes sense. As a front end to gcc, our "source language"
is very odd, it is binary files encoding the sequence of function calls the "actual"
frontend would have me to an "actual" backend.

 - Jay

----------------------------------------
> Date: Mon, 5 Jul 2010 08:39:55 -0400
> From: hendrik at topoi.pooq.com
> To: m3devel at elegosoft.com
> Subject: Re: [M3devel] licensing (gcc patches)
>
> 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