Red Hat: no desktop products coming [LWN.net]

Red Hat: no desktop products coming

Posted Apr 21, 2008 19:21 UTC (Mon) by nix (subscriber, #2304)
In reply to: Red Hat: no desktop products coming by mmarq
Parent article: Red Hat: no desktop products coming

Neither is the binary, even packed in RPM format, that Adobe does using GCC, and that distros include in their repositorys.

Distros that don't ship non-free software don't ship that binary (assuming you mean Flash). (Is it even redistributable? I thought most distros shipped a script that downloaded it from Adobe.)

if GCC had been partitionable as you suggest, we wouldn't have a free Objective C frontend today.)
Why not ?... is the Objective C frontend close source ?

No, but had it been easy to get it to emit something that GCC's backend could have processed, the frontend would have been closed-source. (This is a matter of historical record by this point. If I'm wrong, Joe Buck can tell me I'm full of crap, if he's still reading.)

But if that happens wouldn't it be a clear GPL violation ?

If GCC emits a stable intermediate representation (as it would have to for distros to usefully ship things in that form), and accepts that representation for further processing, then having some closed-source program emit it probably would not be a GPL violation: at least it would be very hard to prove. This is why GCC doesn't, and won't, emit a stable intermediate representation. (The representation used for link-time optimizations is, as I understand it, by design not stable enough to be usefully emittable by anything but GCC, and definitely not intended as a medium to transport code between machines in.)

isn't AMD CTM/CAL open sourced ?... what is so terrible wrong about cooperation so that the lower parts of that driver could be modular and treated by GCC the same way that Linux treats firmware ?

This is already doable by implementing a GCC backend that accepts whatever representation the CTM/CAL code generator accepts. It's just like cross-compilation, in fact it is cross-compilation: exactly the same mechanism is used to generate code for the Cell SPUs.

But it's not something that magically kicks in: there'd be a different version of a package that had code like this in it, or perhaps a new glibc hwcap and corresponding subdirectories searched by the dynamic linker for shared libraries containing object files in the appropriate form.

I don't have to convince nobody. Time is a cure for everything.

If you want to get GCC to emit a stable intermediate representation, you have to convince RMS :)

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