> The FSF might successfully present to a court an argument such as: > > Look, Your Honor, it is quite obvious that the code in question was > developed to work as a single program, and that the separation > through the intermedia representation layer is just an attempt to > escape the conditions of the license of the program they based their > work on. Please don't permit the defendant to keep on distributing > that code without complying with the license conditions.
Yes, such an argument might be successful and indeed many people, including myself, believe it *likely* would be successful, but going to court is in many way a "crap shoot" and it might *not* be successful. If that happened it would set a precedent that could be extended on in a way that would be harmful to Free Software. That's why it's considered far better to try to avoid such a case in the first place. Moreover, if we did this in conjunction with a carefully-defined API, the defendant could argue that the purpose of that API was precisely to *not* have it be viewed as a single program, so the result of such a case would be far less certain. As was pointed out here numerous times, 90+% of the difficulty in working with is the difficulty in understanding the inherently-complex algorithmic structure of the compiler and its data structures (no real-world compiler will ever be able to use algorithms unmodified from a textbook) coupled with limited documentation. Doing something to make the remaining few percent easier will not, in my opinion, increase the participation in GCC enough to justify the legal risk to Free Software.
