Re: [DotGNU]Licence question about GNU and GCC

[James Michael DuPont]

Norbert,

I am a big supporter, fan and user of GNU software and

want only the best for the project.
I am not trying to undermine the GPL, but point out a
inherent danger that the SOAP and DOTGNU technology
will open up all of the gpl'd code to. 

This is one of the major worries of the GCC community
when presented with the ideas of an XML representation
of the ast. But it applies to all the other GPLed code
when brought into a DOTGNU environment.

The interest that I have in the gcc compiler is to
bring what you have with c# and java to the c world.
Reflection, Introspection, Serialization.

The ability to create meta programs that act on the
existing code, to walk the member list, see what
functions call which and such, these are great
features of OpenC++ provides.

I am prototyping my GCC extension in perl, because of
the nature of the enviroment, it gives you access to
all types of interesting information about the running
program. For me to connect the perl code to the GCC
via an XML representation of the AST is very clean and
easy to debug. I can imagine that some of work that I
am doing will be interesting to the DOTGNU program. 

The possibility to use the GCC as a front-end on the
ast level and not on the rtl level has not been
discussed yet. Maybe it would be of benifit to the
DOTGNU?

> So my answer is:  You are free to do this, but I
> would request
> that you please reconsider it, because anything
> which has the
> effect of weakening in effect the copyleft nature of
> gcc's
> licensing is not likely to make the world a better
> place.
Yes of course, I am not trying to weaken the GPL.
The SOAP was just an example.

> > How does the licencing of the DOT GNU cover this.
> 
> We use the GNU GPL, knowing that it gives the user a
> *lot* of
> freedoms, including freedom to do some things that
> we wouldn't
> like to happen.
Very well put.

Mike

=====
James Michael DuPont

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