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Re: Notes from the GROW'10 workshop panel (GCC research opportunities workshop)
On 14 April 2010 23:34, Basile Starynkevitch <basile@starynkevitch.net> wrote:
>
> And my personal preference on GCC licensing would be more a Linux-kernel
> like GPL with copyright belonging to authors employee (I don't feel a SCO
> like issue as a major threat today; it might have been ten years ago). That
> is much easier to get than a copyright transfer to FSF.
I am sorry but I do not think the copyright transfer/ GCC license is
worth discussing in this list. What we can improve (and we should) is
the process itself to simplify contribution but the legal aspects and
discussions about licenses are off-topic in this list and likely to
generate more noise than productive results. In any case, if you or
your legal department think they help in this area, you should please
get in contact directly with the legal department of the FSF. There is
nothing we can do in this list.
And given the feedback provided by Grigori, the licensing issues are
very low in the list of complains from academia and the major
complaints are technical (speed, simplicity, and documentation).
> And GCC is probably less threatened today by legal issues Ä la SCO than by
> obesity, obsolescence, outside competition -eg LLVM- and perhaps even less
> interest by industry for the low level languages (C, C++, Ada) GCC is
> processing. Even in industry, scripting languages (or languages like Java or
> C# which are not practically significant for GCC) have more market share
> than a dozen years ago.
You know there is a Java FE in GCC, don't you?
http://gcc.gnu.org/java/
And whether a language is significant or not for GCC is a question of
someone contributing a FE for it. So if someone wants to generate
optimized machine code for a large number of targets from their C#
source code, they are welcome to contribute a C# FE.
And calling Ada "low-level"... Honestly, let's stop this sub-thread
here. No more discussion about plugins or legal issues, please.
Cheers,
Manuel.