Re: need more constant constraints

[Stan Shebs <shebs at apple dot com>]

David Edelsohn wrote:
> 
> >>>>> Aldy Hernandez writes:
> 
> Aldy> yes yes yes.  i would love that, but... it turns out that apple is
> Aldy> basing their code on motorola's original patch, and they haven't
> Aldy> submitted the paperwork for the copyright.
> 
> Aldy> motorola has a present and future copyright assignment but only for 68k
> Aldy> and 88k.  so unless motorola signs off, we can't use the apple/motorola
> Aldy> code base.
> 
>         Your information about the starting point for the work is
> completely incorrect.  Apple is not using Motorola's original
> implementation exactly because of the copyright issue.

Uh, right now we are.  At one point I was planning to redo everything
because I thought that they didn't have a copyright assignment, but
in July Kumar Gala assured us that Motorola did have one.  Here's a
copy of the message I just sent off to assign@gnu.org, in the hopes
of getting a definitive ruling that everybody will accept:

Subject: Motorola's copyright assignment for GCC
Date: Fri, 28 Sep 2001 07:09:46 -0700
From: Stan Shebs <shebs@apple.com>
To: assign@gnu.org

Hi, a question has arisen on the GCC list about the extent of the
copyright assignment that Motorola has on file.

A couple of years ago, Motorola wrote a set of patches to GCC to
provide support for the AltiVec vector unit in the PowerPC, and
made them generally available.  Recently a number of us have been
working on integrating them into GCC as distributed by the FSF.
However, some persons have expressed doubt that Motorola's
current copyright assignment covers these patches - apparently
the assignment, which is from 1993 and thus predates the PowerPC,
only mentions changes for the 68k and 88k processors, which were
the only two that Motorola offered at the time.

Recently you sent a copy of the old assignment to Kumar Gala of
Motorola, who has said publicly that the processors are only
mentioned in schedule A, but that the body of the assignment
doesn't limit Motorola's assignment to just what is in the
schedule.  So the situation is very confused right now, and GCC
maintainers can't act because they don't know whether the copyright
to the AltiVec patches has or has not already been assigned to the
FSF.

We would greatly appreciate if you would have somebody authoritative
review the assignment, and post the decision about whether the
AltiVec patches are covered by it to gcc@gcc.gnu.org.

Stan Shebs
shebs@apple.com