William "Chops" Westfield mac.com> writes: > suddenly fall under GPL. For instance, I know that the compiler writers > at intel are not allowed to get any where NEAR gcc... I don't know if > the gnu people would actually go so far as to go after such cases, but > it's definitely something corporate lawyers worry about... As they should ... > The most virus-like aspect of gpl/etc is the way it can suddenly cause > in unexpected results. For instance, we just said that LGPL only leaves > applications proprietary if libraries are dynamically linked. That's > swell for windows and linux, but none of my embedded systems have a > facility for doing dynamically linked libraries. Does that mean that > everything I write with avrgcc that uses the provided C libraries > (perhaps > even the internal libraries that do multi-byte math or floating point) > should be open source? Ewww! It might. And the solution would be if someone (f.ex. Olin) would have a GPLd version of, say, his floating point libs. Then you would hard link against his library. Once happy that it works (you do not need to publish anything at this time, since you are not distributing it - yet), you can contact Olin and work out a license for his libs. Then you hard link against the (improved, for you, by Olin, at a price) library supplied by Olin and everyone is happy. Or gone to http://www.uclibc.org/FAQ.html and read a little (Q6). The 'linkable object file' you would have to provide would be in no way different from a dll you would purchase commercially for another OS. It is not 'source code'. See how the GPL fear prevented you from ripping code that *might* have been someone else's ? You apply self censorship because of this. GPL at work! In practice, I doubt any of the people whose code you might have been tempted to 'quietly incorporate', would have any resources to sue you or your employer. But under the GPL, you can't, you don't want to rip (just supposing)! Peter ok, this thread was long enough. I am getting off it. -- http://www.piclist.com PIC/SX FAQ & list archive View/change your membership options at http://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/piclist