[sdcc-devel] Freedom
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From: Philipp Klaus Krause <pkk@sp...> - 2008-05-27 20:59:33
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-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 sdcc 2.8.0 has been included in Debian a few days ago. In Debian non-free. I think this would be a good time to think about freedom and if we should try to make sdcc free. On the website we claim "SDCC is Free Open Source Software, distributed under GNU General Public License (GPL)". Unfortunately that's not really true. Those who download sdcc (from subversion or a release from sourceforge) do get a mixture of free and non-free parts. Many ports won't work without non-free parts. The main problem is asxxxx and aslink, non-free assemblers and linkers used by many ports. These are the reason sdcc is now in Debian non-free. I think we should find a solution, replacing them by free software. Either by using alternative, free software or persuading aslink's author to make them free (this bit of a mail from him has been posted to the mailing list by Borut: "I probably could be persuaded to allow the merged parts to be licensed under the GNU license." However so far this is just my opinion. What do other sdcc developers think about this? Is freedom of assemblers and linkers important? How much of an effort would it be? Is it worth it? Another unsolved problem is the library license issue. This has been a known problem for a long time, but a solution has been postphoned for both the 2.7.0 and the 2.8.0 release. While libraries under LGPL or GPL may be unacceptable to many users of sdcc there seems to be an even bigger problem. Looking at http://sdcc.wiki.sourceforge.net/SDCC+Library+Licenses I see there are parts of the library with unknown license. At http://sdcc.wiki.sourceforge.net/SDCC+Library+Licenses developers stated their opinion on licenses. It seems the only license everyone that stated theri opinion agreed to is GPL+LE. There were just a few developers that didn't state their opinion there. I suggest we try to resolve both issues before the sdcc 2.9.0 release. Maybe port maintainers could use svn blame on all files in "their" part of the library that have no license info or a license incompatible with GPL+LE to check who contributed to them. If all contributors agreed to GPL+LE the license could be changed to GPL+LE. Then we could do the same on the files directly in device/lib. The people doing this should make a list of files that have licenses incompatible with GPL+LE that have contributors that didn't agree to the change. We could the dicuss these cases here. Philipp P.S.: It think the README implies that the documentation is under the GPL, but this could be stated more explicitly. -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.6 (GNU/Linux) Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org iD8DBQFIPHYUbtUV+xsoLpoRAqNDAKCSwpkRo3cZT9a2Ai2boGjeOq66cACffRu3 PTcKPHPqvkg2KS3m9crRydo= =4Wsz -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- |