> On Jan 9, 2017, at 4:08 PM, David Brown <da...@westcontrol.com> wrote:
> ...
> I found a reference to this in MISRA's forums:
>
> <https://www.misra.org.uk/forum/viewtopic.php?f=56&t=1189>
>
> The post and reply are from 4 years ago, but I expect the situation is the
> same now as then. Basically, MISRA are quite happy for any tools to support
> checking of the rules, no matter what the license of the tools, and there is
> no certification or checking for conformance. However, if you are going to
> include the rule texts, you need that part of the checker to be under a
> "commercial license agreement that contain[s] the expected restrictions on
> reverse engineering or extracting of information from the software". The say
> it's fine for a pure open source checker to refer to the checks by MISRA rule
> number, but not by rule text. It looks like no license is needed from MISRA
> to do this.
I'd say that messages of the form "you violated rule number 42" are
unacceptable, since they have no intellegible meaning. And the MISRA reply you
pointed to says specifically that GCC couldn't get a license to use the
messages because it's under GPL. (The "additional module" exception mentioned
afterwards seems to be based on a misunderstanding of the GPL "derived work"
machinery.)
It looks like MISRA should adjust its rules if it wants to support open source.
paul
