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First FOSS OS?

Posted Mar 22, 2007 18:28 UTC (Thu) by JoeBuck (subscriber, #2330)
In reply to: First FOSS OS? by nix
Parent article: The road to freedom in the embedded world

GCC will go GPLv3 only, but all the support libraries GCC relies on have a "special exception" clause that essentially lets you build proprietary code with gcc.

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First FOSS OS?

Posted Mar 22, 2007 21:09 UTC (Thu) by landley (guest, #6789) [Link]

If gcc actually requires this exception than any gplv3 word processor
will require a similar exception to avoid the word processing documents
you save out from being considered derived works of the word processor,
and that's deeply silly.

They came up with lgpl for glibc because significant chunks of the
library wind up copied verbatim into the resulting program (especially
when statically linked), so you can make a strong case that it IS a
derived work. But translation software shouldn't slap an extra layer of
copyright on someone's document when it turns french into spanish.
There's no additional creative element embodied in the resulting work.

Having the exception to make you feel better is one thing, but compiling
a program with Microsoft's proprietary compilerm, or Sun's Java compiler,
doesn't make the result owned by Microsoft either. (The runtime
libraries are another matter.)

Rob

First FOSS OS?

Posted Mar 23, 2007 14:19 UTC (Fri) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

Word processors don't textually copy parts of the word processor into
documents you save with it.

GCC *does* textually copy parts of itself (libgcc, libstdc++ headers,
<stddef.h>...) into programs built with it (some of these technically get
copied by the linker, but it's GCC that induces the linker into doing that
copying).

Microsoft *do* claim rights over programs you build with their C compiler,
again because of the language runtime (mostly? they may have other
patent-related reasoning which I'm not really interested in since it
doesn't apply to anything remotely free).

First FOSS OS?

Posted Mar 23, 2007 14:16 UTC (Fri) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

I was trying to emphasise that the *exceptions* would remain, and
GPL+exception != GPL.