From: Garrett S. <gar...@mi...> - 2010-07-12 18:04:31
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Sorry for the late reply... I joined the mailing list, and then the next day I went out of town for two weeks (China & Canada). >> Presumably he is doing his work on CoApp with the full knowledge and >> approval of his superiors, at least a few steps up the chain. Indeed... I have support of my superiors all the way up to our Corporate VP for Windows Server, whom I got signoff for CoApp directly. >> ... ask him whether he could try to persuade Microsoft to release the >> headers for at least the C libraries and the core Win32 API ... I could begin to find out what it would take... I suspect this is a long road to walk down... I will start poking folks this week. Off the top of my head, I do have a couple of thoughts in this regard: - Does anyone know if other C/C++ compilers (like Watcom, Borland, etc) ever redistributed the SDK headers? If they licensed them for redistribution, the easiest path may be getting the same type of license they used--assuming of course that we could get it zero-fee. - Since the SDK is free to download... you might look at it from another direction: have the installer download the SDK ISO file, and extract the files that you need (or some other automation that gets you what you want). Garrett Serack | Open Source Software Developer | Microsoft Corporation -----Original Message----- From: Tor Lillqvist [mailto:tm...@ik...] Sent: Saturday, June 26, 2010 12:57 AM To: MinGW Users List Subject: Re: [Mingw-users] gcc forks on Windows (was re: repository for Open Source Windows) Note that we now have a person on this list who is known to actually work for Microsoft, and who works on promoting Open Source, and clearly approves of gcc being an alternative compiler on Windows for cases where MSVC for some reason doesn't fit. I am talking about Garrett Serack, the CoApp maintainer. Presumably he is doing his work on CoApp with the full knowledge and approval of his superiors, at least a few steps up the chain. So perhaps we should just ask him whether he could try to persuade Microsoft to release the headers for at least the C libraries and the core Win32 API (of course, the more APIs, the better) under a more permissive license that would permit their redistribution, slightly edited as necessary to be palatable to gcc. Or even to just accept gcc-specific ifdefs into their headers and allow them to be redistributed unmodified. That would at least get rid of one cause for the mingw.org / mingw-w64 schisma. Although, especially that second way (getting gcc ifdefs upstream into MS headers, redistributing allowed only unmodified) would probably mak them unacceptable to for instance Debian. But there could always be packages that would download the headers from Microsoft to each machine directly, instead of distributing with a distro, just like many distros to for some MS fonts, for instance. Another thing, and now we definitely come into "I am not a lawyer" territory: Conan Kudo says some countries in Europe makes it "illegal" to make anything "Public Domain". I think that is exaggerating. In my opinion saying that something is "illegal" is equivalent to saying it is explicitly prohibited by law, and perhaps in fact punishable. I guess in the "public domain" concept simply is undefined and meaningless in these countries. Presumably in the legal tradition of such countries an author of a work can never lose the moral rights to the work, even if the author would want to. Presumably, even in this tradition, if an author donates a work to the public domain in another country where such a concept has a meaning, it would be accepted as implicitly publishing it under very generous license, though, while retaining the moral rights to it. Which is more or less equally good in my opinion, no? --tml ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ This SF.net email is sponsored by Sprint What will you do first with EVO, the first 4G phone? Visit sprint.com/first -- http://p.sf.net/sfu/sprint-com-first _______________________________________________ MinGW-users mailing list Min...@li... This list observes the Etiquette found at http://www.mingw.org/Mailing_Lists. We ask that you be polite and do the same. Disregard for the list etiquette may cause your account to be moderated. _______________________________________________ You may change your MinGW Account Options or unsubscribe at: https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/mingw-users |