Re: coverage license information

[Paolo Bonzini <bonzini at gnu dot org>]

Il 04/02/2013 17:46, Ian Lance Taylor ha scritto:
> On Mon, Feb 4, 2013 at 6:54 AM, Frediano Ziglio
> <frediano.ziglio@citrix.com> wrote:
>>
>> I imported some headers from Linux kernel which mainly came from
>> gcov-io.h and the structures used internally by GCC.
>>
>> Our problem is currently about the license. In gcov-io.h is stated that
>> license is mainly GPL2 which the exception that linking the "library"
>> with other files does not cause these files to be GPL2. Now however I'm
>> not linking to any library but just using the structure declaration
>> inside the header to produce a blob that is currently converted into GCC
>> files by an external utility (Xen has not file system so we extract
>> coverage information).
>>
>> It's not a problem to use these headers/structure from Xen (which is
>> GPL2) but we'd like to have these defines in our public include headers.
>> The license however of these headers is quite open and allow to be used
>> for instance in commercial programs. How the license would affect these
>> programs?
>>
>> Another question we have is the stability of these structures. Can we
>> just check the version field of gcov_info to make sure that the internal
>> structure is not changed or is it expected that even this field would
>> change (for instance position or size inside the structure) ?
> 
> You neglected to say which version of GCC you are using.  In current
> GCC the header file gcov-io.h is under GPLv3 with the GCC Runtime
> Library Exception 3.1
> (http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gcc-exception-3.1.html).

Would it make sense to release the header file under a permissive
license or even public domain?

The information there is just ABI, it's dubious that it is copyrightable
at all.  If two colleagues of Frediano's did a clean-room reverse
engineering, the result would really be indistiguishable from the original.

Paolo