From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: (qmail 7851 invoked by alias); 3 Dec 2002 19:36:57 -0000 Mailing-List: contact gcc-help@gcc.gnu.org; run by ezmlm Precedence: bulk List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: Sender: gcc-owner@gcc.gnu.org Received: (qmail 7841 invoked from network); 3 Dec 2002 19:36:55 -0000 Received: from unknown (HELO piper.synopsys.com) (146.225.1.217) by sources.redhat.com with SMTP; 3 Dec 2002 19:36:55 -0000 Received: (from jbuck@localhost) by piper.synopsys.com (8.11.6/8.11.6) id gB3JahA17197; Tue, 3 Dec 2002 11:36:43 -0800 From: Joe Buck Message-Id: <200212031936.gB3JahA17197@piper.synopsys.com> Subject: Re: Dumping RTL??? To: falemagn@studenti.unina.it (Fabio Alemagna) Date: Tue, 03 Dec 2002 11:36:00 -0000 Cc: aph@redhat.com (Andrew Haley), gyana_m@hotmail.com (gyanindra mishra), gcc@gcc.gnu.org In-Reply-To: from "Fabio Alemagna" at Dec 03, 2002 01:00:38 PM MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-SW-Source: 2002-12/txt/msg00137.txt.bz2 On Tue, 3 Dec 2002, Andrew Haley wrote: > > We've made that impossible with standard gcc. This is deliberate. > > > > It's deliberate because we don't want someone to be able to use the > > front end of gcc with an unfree back end. Fabio Alemagna writes: > Then just prohibit it in the license... It's not that simple. Licenses can't do everything. [ It's quite likely that the following isn't completely correct, and my fellow amateur lawyers will enjoy picking it to death. I suggest that this is only worthwhile if there are major errors rather than errors in detail. ] Some types of license terms only work if there is a contract. The GPL, LGPL, Berkeley, and other open source licenses work because they start with copyright law, and grant the user more rights: if you have legally obtained a copyrighted work, you can use it however you want, but you have (almost) no right to copy, modify or distribute it (I say "almost" because the law lets you make a backup copy of a program, there's fair use, etc, and details depend on the country you live in). Free software/Open source licenses let the user do things that copyright law normally forbids, if certain conditions are followed (fewer conditions for Berkeley, more for LGPL, still more for GPL). Because rights are only added, not taken away, we don't have to force GCC users to agree to a license. But a license that forbids using a piece of software in a certain way (in this case, reading the dumped output into a proprietary program, or accepting certain data as input) takes rights away, so there has to be a binding contract. Shrink-wrap licenses are one possibility in some jurisdictions, but how do you make sure that all users have agreed to the license? In the US, the DMCA could be used, I suppose: add some kind of bogus encryption/access control mechanism, threaten users with five years in jail if they go around it. I'd be against such tactics.