I don't recall seeing anything in the installer about distcc's source, and a grep through /Developer and the installer receipts for the SDK don't have any mention of distcc except for general distcc troubleshooting stuff. :P
Could you check that please?
In the license section of the developer tools installer is this:
B. Certain components of the Developer Software, and third party open source programs included with the Apple Software, have been or may be made available by Apple on its Open Source web site (http://www.opensource.apple.com/) (collectively the “Open-Sourced Components”). You may modify or replace only these Open-Sourced Components; provided that: (i) the resultant modified Developer Software is used in accordance with the permitted uses set forth above; and (ii) you otherwise comply with the terms of this License and any applicable licensing terms governing use of the Open-Sourced Components. Apple is not obligated to provide any maintenance, technical or other support for the resultant modified Developer Software.
...and then further down:
11. Third Party Acknowledgements.
A. Portions of the Developer Software utilize or include third party software and other copyrighted material. Acknowledgements, licensing terms and disclaimers for such material are contained in the “online” electronic documentation for the Developer Software, and your use of such material is governed by their respective terms.
B. Certain software libraries and other third party software included with the Apple Software are free software and licensed under the terms of the GNU General Public License (GPL) or the GNU Library/Lesser General Public License (LGPL), as the case may be. You may obtain a complete machine-readable copy of the source code for such free software under the terms of the GPL or LGPL, as the case may be, without charge except for the cost of media, shipping, and handling, upon written request to Apple. The GPL/LGPL software is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY, without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. A copy of the GPL and LGPL is included with the Apple Software.
On the subject of the technical issues, though, is anyone interested/willing/capable of forward-porting apple's changes to a modern distcc? It would be definitely nice to have...
Last time I looked, the Apple changes were pretty messy. I would like to see the general idea moved in though. For general use, I think you would need some kind of check that the gcc versions matched properly. I'm planning to add some checks in a future version.
Yeah, they were rather messy. They seemed to be implementing some architectural features that exist in later distcc's, in a much more ugly manner. =)
You would also need to find a mDNS library under an appropriate (GPL, MIT, or weaker) licence.
Apple's posix implementation of mDNS is available under the APSL 2. As far as I can tell, it's got a bsd-ish advertising clause, and if you make changes to their mDNSresponder and deploy them, you must release those changes as APSL 2. There's no restrictions on other things linking against it:
4. Larger Works. You may create a Larger Work by combining Covered Code with other code not governed by the terms of this License and distribute the Larger Work as a single product. In each such instance, You must make sure the requirements of this License are fulfilled for the Covered Code or any portion thereof.
Whether that's enough or not I don't know, I don't recall exactly how such things fall under linking and derivative works, but from my clearly layman point of view, it seems like something that can be linked against without issue.
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