Re: [DotGNU]TODOs until this weekend

[James Michael DuPont]

--- Leon Brocard <address@hidden> wrote:
> James Michael DuPont sent the following bits through the ether:
> 
> > Please send me some links about the license change.
> 
> 
> If you have an opinion about licenses (that we haven't heard before
> ;-) why not join in?

Well, I am trying to reduce my license noise level down to a minimum,
but here are my ideas:

1. Correct me if I am wrong, An MIT/(BSD -advertizing) licensed code
can be distributed as part of GPL application, so it should be possible
to create a GPL version of parrot, or make GPL specific add ons. Right?

2. The internal representation: 
> There hasn't been much public discussion of it recently, apart from:
> http://archive.develooper.com/address@hidden/msg13360.html

>Parrot's license will explicitly not 
>cover generated bytecode, nor will it cover the internal 
>representation of anyone's source, much in the way that gcc's license 
>doesn't apply to the object files it generates (and unlike the way 
>gcc's license does apply to its internal representations of things) 
>Note that this won't affect the license and rights of other people's 
>code--if a bytecode file has bytecode that came from GPL'd source 
>(that was not parrot core), then the GPL would still apply to it.

The internal representation of things in the gcc is not under license,
just the access to the data via copyrighted structures and functions. 

In general any GPL code is based on copyright law and cannot be used to
limit access to the data contained in a program, much stronger
contracts are needed, and those are in general not compatible with free
software.

The externalization of that internal representation makes it mostly
copyright neutral, at the most it is a mechanical copy of the input
data. 

There are many tools like my introspector that use this internal
representation. The fsf cannot do anything about it, even more, any
tool that provides source code can be modified in such a was as to
externalize its data.

I can understand the wish to make parrot x11/mit/bsd, and think that it
would be good to make it available for adoptation. The DotGNU project
and the GCC project should aim to build the bridges to Parrot, even if
those bridges are not under the same license. 

For my project, the introspector, I will be converting all libs used
into statically linked GPL modules, even the LGPL modules can be
converted back into GPL for an individual copy. This will reduce the
ability to link in non-free code into the gcc interface, and get rid of
any fears of abuse.

Mike

=====
James Michael DuPont
http://introspector.sourceforge.net/

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