On Fri, Nov 24, 2023 at 09:06:29AM +0000, Daniel P. Berrangé wrote: > On Thu, Nov 23, 2023 at 05:39:18PM -0500, Michael S. Tsirkin wrote: > > On Thu, Nov 23, 2023 at 05:58:45PM +0000, Daniel P. Berrangé wrote: > > > The license of a code generation tool itself is usually considered > > > to be not a factor in the license of its output. > > > > Really? I would find it very surprising if a code generation tool that > > is not a language model and so is not understanding the code it's > > generating did not include some code snippets going into the output. > > It is also possible to unintentionally run afoul of GPL's definition of > > source > > code which is "the preferred form of the work for making modifications to > > it". > > So even if you have copyright to input, dumping just output and putting > > GPL on it might or might not be ok. > > Consider the C pre-processor. This takes an input .c file, and expands > all the macros, to split out a new .c file. > > The license of the output .c file is determined by the license of the > input .c file. The license of the CPP impl (whether OSS or proprietary) > doesn't have any influence on the license of the output file, it cannot > magically force the output file to be proprietary any more than it can > force it to be output file GPL. > > With regards, > Daniel
Sorry I don't get how is C preprocessor relevant here? It does not generate source code in the GPL sense. We won't accept C preprocessor output in a patch. Not being a lawyer I personally am not really interested in discussing how copyright works, certainly not at this highly abstract and simplified level. -- MST
