Re: Removal of support for GCC hosted on UWIN

[Joe Buck <jbuck at racerx dot synopsys dot com>]

Chris Demetriou writes:
> By the way, I don't see anything on the GCC mission statement that
> says that when the FSF or RMS says "jump," the GCC project (as steered
> by the steering committee) has to say "how high."  Certainly there's
> some motivation for that, but if the demand is to make a change which
> is not technically sound, there should, in my opinion, be pushback.

Let me assure you that there is pushback: on the steering committee list
there are occasionally rather vigorous arguments where SC members push
back, hard, against something RMS requests, and RMS is often persuaded
that the original request wasn't such a good idea.

But this is a legal matter, and the SC tends to defer to RMS much more
on such things unless we think he misunderstands the facts.

> I've not seen any justification for removing the U/WIN support here
> other than the flawed (AFAICT) logic in the original message you sent
> (since it discounted the notion of u/win users building their own
> binaries which from commentary by others seems a reasonable
> proposition) and the appeal to authority ("ask the FSF").

There was an error in the original statement that Mark posted, yes.  It is
legal to link GPL and proprietary code, it's just not legal to distribute
or modify the result.  Just the same, to leave it in the distribution is
just going to lead people to infringe out of ignorance.

To clarify: the policy is that we're not going to ship anything that
has the effect, when you type "make bootstrap", of creating an executable
that is illegal to distribute.  If there are other problematic cases,
then they may be withdrawn as well.  Understood?