On Mon, 2007-07-16 at 08:42 +0200, Basile STARYNKEVITCH wrote: > Laurent GUERBY wrote: > > I hope your employer follows industry standard practice of caring *a > > lot* about licensing issues for all the software they use. You're > > greatly mistaken if you think only compiler hackers look at software > > licences, lawyers and management have they say here (at least > > in the organisations I know). > > Of course CEA's lawyers do care about GPL and know it quite well (the CECILL > license http://cecill.info/ which in my > limited understanding is an adaptation of GPL to french law originated at CEA > & INRIA & CNRS). > [...] > Very few compilers (even proprietary) have strange licenses affecting the > legal status of the produced binary (and I am > not sure the license of the compiler matters here). The only exceptions I > heard of are some (eg prolog or lisp) > compilers with an explicit runtime license (usually per binary sold or > transfered) for their runtime library. > [...]
I guess you've not often been involved with proprietary compiler EULA analysis, to quote one widely used (if not the most widely used) proprietary compiler user deployment guide: http://msdn2.microsoft.com/EN-US/library/aa985617(VS.80).aspx << Note: Redistributing debug VC++ programs is not permitted by the EULA. You can only do this for testing purposes internally. See the EULA for Visual Studio 2005. >> And "internal" can be quite complex to define wrt copyright law in some corporate setups. A clear message from the FSF on the importance of the licensing change through versions numbers will make the life of lots of GCC users in the corporate world much simpler. Laurent
