Re: [Tinycc-devel] linking tinycc

[Thomas Preud'homme]

Le vendredi 3 janvier 2014, 08:23:10 Christian Jullien a écrit :
> Good question,
> 
> 
> 
> Here is my understanding:
> 
> Because of COPYING which states that tcc is LGPL, I would say NO unless your
> project is GPL but there is an attempt to move tcc to a BSD like license
> (see RELICENSING).
> 
> At that time, we've got no reply from some maintainers.
> 
> 
> 
> As I understand from RELICENSING, tcc for x86_64 elf (only) is safe to
> static link (if you add copyright notice) while tcc for arm is still using
> LGPL by default which prevents you to statically link with tcc unless your
> whole project is also GPL.

I didn't check this but I believe you checked well. I'll just comment on the 
general issue. What matters is the license of libtcc as a whole and this is 
determined by the license of individual components linked together to make the 
library. I don't think law has determined whether copyright is per file or more 
fined grained but it shouldn't make a big difference in the case of tcc. Files 
are usually mainly contributed by 1 or 2 big contributors and the rest are 
small patches that probably don't have copyright on their own (IANAL though).

So to answer your question you need to look at what files are used to create 
libtcc on your system and the copyrights of each of those files. The former 
information can be found in the Makefile or more simply by compiling libtcc and 
observing the output of Make. Yes, you can make Make not output the command it 
runs but tcc doesn't do this for compiling linking commands. For the latter 
(copyright of each files) you should look at each source file and RELICENSING 
as 
Julien stated. If you use tcc 0.9.26 you can alternatively look at 
debian/copyright [0] which gives this in a human and machine readable way. No 
relicensing involved there since it predates it. You can only take relicensing 
into account if you plan to look at the licensing question for the mob branch.

[0] 
http://ftp-master.metadata.debian.org/changelogs/main/t/tcc/experimental_copyright

> 
> 
> 
> It would be nice to clarify if maintainers not having replied say Yes or say
> No.

Yeah but probably these people didn't even notice the relicensing. People 
changes email and move to different projects.

Best regards,

Thomas