I was following this thread with quite and interest and have couple questions and comments on my own.
Sean Luke <sean_at_cs.gmu.edu> wrote:
> But in truth, the reason we did this was because Paul was concerned, and
> I figured it's easier to ask WabaSoft for permission to change matters
> right now than to just push our luck with them later. So we got the
> license changed to BSD. Anyway, here's the paragraph in the GPL that's
> at the heart of the problem (see section 3 of
> http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.html ):
>
> > The source code for a work means the preferred form of the work for
> > making modifications to it. For an executable work, complete source
> > code means all the source code for all modules it contains, plus any
> > associated interface definition files, plus the scripts used to control
> > compilation and installation of the executable. However, as a special
> > exception, the source code distributed need not include anything that
> > is normally distributed (in either source or binary form) with the
> > major components (compiler, kernel, and so on) of the operating system
> > on which the executable runs, unless that component itself accompanies
> > the executable.
>
> Paul's (plausible) interpretation of the above is that cross-compilation
> (compiling on one machine [the Mac] for another platform [the Newton])
> is outside the "special exception" and thus the compiler and libraries
> must be open source.
I've never heard of such a twisted approach to GPL interpretation as Paul have (of course
I realise that GPL is written by lawers in the language that allows numerous interpretations :-).
Following Paul's interpretation of the above paragraph - I would say that basically Paul is
saying that GPL only allowed with GPL tools. I.e. for example Java based GPL programs
are not possible - at least as soon as you are using Java runtime library from Sun (JDK is
open sourced but not GPL'ed). I understand that there was various attempts to re-implement
it but AFAIK there's no one for Java 2 (jdk versions starting from 1.2). The question is
then - what about all existing Java tools that are GPL'ed.
Or what about for instance writing GPL'ed tools for MS Windows using Microsoft's
Visual C++ (like Basilisk II port for Windows - it won't compile with gcc)?
Anyway following Paul's understanding of the above paragraph - I was wondering how
FSF managed to create GPL'ed tools on a very first place? I mean that they have to use
something to compile very first version of GCC or as at least? And I guess that they didn't
used GPL'ed tools/compilers/libraries to do that because they did not existed at that time yet.
Please correct me if I'm wrong.
Regards,
Alex
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