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Re: libiberty legal status ?
- To: Marc dot Espie at liafa dot jussieu dot fr
- Subject: Re: libiberty legal status ?
- From: Mike Stump <mrs at wrs dot com>
- Date: Wed, 8 Sep 1999 14:15:41 -0700 (PDT)
- Cc: egcs at egcs dot cygnus dot com
> Date: Wed, 8 Sep 1999 11:28:13 +0200
> From: Marc Espie <Marc.Espie@liafa.jussieu.fr>
> While browsing thru libiberty code, I noticed a rather disturbing problem.
> Some of the files there have been bodily lifted from other GNU tools,
> verbatim.
> This means that they retain a full GPL copyright notice, whereas
> libiberty license is supposed to be LGPL.
> So, suddenly, the legal status of libiberty is completely unclear.
> I presume the logical course would be to change the copyright notice
> of these files, which only the FSF can do, if I read things right...
libiberty should not be used to satisfy requirements from libgcc.a or
any of libgcc style runtimes. We should either seek to get the FSF to
relax them a bit, or start up a libiberty for the runtime (new name)
that has the libgcc clause on it and only that.
The licensing needs to be stable (for a decade at a time), and well
thought out and exceptionally clear. Anything less just causes
hysteria and confusion and allows people to FUD gcc. gcc needs to be
FUD resistant.