Davanum Srinivas wrote:
To restate the obvious, If i choose to, i can use another compiler
(say VC++ on Windows -
http://httpd.apache.org/docs/1.3/win_compiling.html) and not care
about GCC's GPL+Exception.
That said, I think that to be fair, we need to distinguish between
"using" in the sense of what GCC is doing - a tool outside the scope
of effort of the project enabling some behavior in a standard and non-
intrusive way (just like we don't care about the license of the OS we
run on), and "using" in the sense of developers of a project making a
conscious decision to design and implement software with a dependency.
This is wrong thinking. You aren't simply "using" the libgcc routines,
as you would OS resources. You are linking your application to the
libgcc library and redistributing the resulting combined binary. This
is precisely what the license talks about and enables.
Whether or not you make a distinction between this kind of GPL+exception
usage and libstdc++ or GNU Classpath usage hardly matters, since the
licenses themselves don't make a distinction.
I think you're missing Anthony's point. He's merely pointing out
that there is no *legal* difference between linking with a tiny
bit of GCC code vs. a huge piece of classlib code. Of course "legal"
reality is often different from "rational" reality (unfortunately
it's the "legal" reality that matters here).
Whether you could have used a different compiler is also besides
the (Anthony's) point, which is simply: ASF is shipping bundled
code licensed under GPL+E today (and has for a long time). The
other details are not legally relevant. It's certainly fair to
discuss them, but that's a separate issue from the one that
started this thread.
Conclusion being: if it's the merely legality that concerns ASF,
then they should already be happy and this whole problem and
discussion can go away (wouldn't that be nice :-)
-Archie
__________________________________________________________________________
Archie Cobbs * CTO, Awarix * http://www.awarix.com
