Re: GPL legal question

[Joe Buck <Joe dot Buck at synopsys dot COM>]

On Mon, Mar 29, 2004 at 12:29:41PM -0500, Graeme Peterson wrote:
> Thanks.  Our lawyers are reviewing this issue, and as you point out, an
> e-mail from someone saying "Sure, go ahead" would not be enough.  I did not
> really expect to find free legal advice, but I had hoped to open a
> discussion and see where it led.  Someone must have thought of doing
> something like this before me, and I am interested in their experience.  I
> suppose I could have worded my initial posting differently, but there it is.
> 
> If this is the wrong forum for this, or if there is no forum for this,
> please let me know.

This is the wrong forum; this is a technical list for the development of
the compiler.

There is the Usenet newsgroup gnu.misc.discuss, which is dedicated to
legal/political arguments about GNU.  The quality of the discussion is
not terribly high.

You could contact the FSF and ask them.  While their opinion is only an
opinion, in cases where they have the copyright anything they bless is
safe, as only they have standing to sue you.

While you should confirm anything with people in a better position to give
you legal advice, it seems that the main question is whether the following
"special exception" language (from libgcc2.c, the 3.3.3 release) gives you
the permission you need:

"In addition to the permissions in the GNU General Public License, the
Free Software Foundation gives you unlimited permission to link the
compiled version of this file into combinations with other programs,
and to distribute those combinations without any restriction coming
from the use of this file.  (The General Public License restrictions
do apply in other respects; for example, they cover modification of
the file, and distribution when not linked into a combine
executable.)

[ That seems like a typo, should be "combined" ]?

The parenthetical remark suggests that maybe you *don't* have permission,
since you aren't linking into a combined executable but rather a combined
library.  But of course IANAL.