On Sat, Jun 23, 2001 at 01:25:12PM +1000, Herbert Xu wrote: > Yes, please review the discussion about KDE. It's a similar situation.
IMHO the big mess with kde was largely related to the way the kde people felt about trolltech and the qt libraries, despite of their at the time uncomfortable license. Perhaps you have to give it to them that their stubborness also helped trolltech to make a graceful step. In the freedos case, I get the impression that the discussions regarding the compiler have an entirely different tone and beat. Clearly even, they have expressed their hope to be able to switch to a free toolchain. > GPL prohibits you from linking GPLed code with libraries under incompatible > licences unless those libraries come with the operating system. So the > point of contention in this case is can the Borland libraries be considered > part of the operating system. There is this consideration that I did not see made yet on debian-legal, in regard to this, namely that the borland libraries might be compatible with the gpl. My first though on this particular case was this: compilers, free or non-free, are used to compile source code that can be under any license of choice by its copyright holder. Users of a compiler do not want their choice of compiler to interfere with their choice of a license. Compiling your code with gcc doesn't make your code or the resulting binaries subject to the gpl, does it? (lets troll some bsd ml..) Why would this be any different with other popular compilers? If this were an issue, how could it be an issue to debian only? So it would really surprise me if this was an actual issue with the borland tc++ 1.01 compiler. But your point is valid, that this cannot be assumed and should be checked. God knows if borland is just putting it up for download to trojan some free software projects. ;-) > The discussion I started on debian-legal did not arrive at any firm > conclusions. <more oil> > Of course, the easy way out is to talk to the FreeDOS people and get them > to add exception clauses to explicitly allow the linking with Borland's > libraries. Who says there is an issue? Moreover, the freedos and dosemu people are seen to be queueing to talk to us already. > > Compiler-related libraries often fall under special give-away licensing > > provisions, so I'm not a priori convinced that there is even likely a > > problem here. Would you say that there is a problem with distributing > > binaries of gpl code compiled by, say a microsoft c compiler? Another intriguing question appeared to me in relation to this particular example. Can I distribute such binaries for express use in wine or any other win32 emulator? Suppose microsoft has put some extra fine print on the shrink-wrap around the latest msvc++ box, that forbids you this. Anyway, I tried to look it up on their site, by searching for "run-time" and "license". It looks okay actually, if you look at: http://support.microsoft.com/support/kb/articles/Q31/8/78.ASP But check out this gem that I stumbled upon: http://msdn.microsoft.com/workshop/components/activex/licensing.asp?frame=true This page should be submitted verbatim both to usenet on next april fools and to the microsoft monopoly monster trial asap. The best part is where they are talking about 'to "hide" the license [..] from the user'. I can not even dream of writing such hallucinating stuff myself. Cheers, Joost
