Re: Dumping RTL???

[Joe Buck <jbuck at synopsys dot com>]

On Tue, 3 Dec 2002, Andrew Haley wrote:
> > We've made that impossible with standard gcc.  This is deliberate.
> >
> > It's deliberate because we don't want someone to be able to use the
> > front end of gcc with an unfree back end.

Fabio Alemagna writes:
> Then just prohibit it in the license...

It's not that simple.  Licenses can't do everything.

[ It's quite likely that the following isn't completely correct, and
  my fellow amateur lawyers will enjoy picking it to death.  I suggest
  that this is only worthwhile if there are major errors rather than
  errors in detail. ]

Some types of license terms only work if there is a contract.  The GPL,
LGPL, Berkeley, and other open source licenses work because they start
with copyright law, and grant the user more rights: if you have legally
obtained a copyrighted work, you can use it however you want, but you have
(almost) no right to copy, modify or distribute it (I say "almost" because
the law lets you make a backup copy of a program, there's fair use, etc,
and details depend on the country you live in).  Free software/Open source
licenses let the user do things that copyright law normally forbids, if
certain conditions are followed (fewer conditions for Berkeley, more for
LGPL, still more for GPL).  Because rights are only added, not taken away,
we don't have to force GCC users to agree to a license.

But a license that forbids using a piece of software in a certain way (in
this case, reading the dumped output into a proprietary program, or
accepting certain data as input) takes rights away, so there has to be a
binding contract.  Shrink-wrap licenses are one possibility in some
jurisdictions, but how do you make sure that all users have agreed to the
license?

In the US, the DMCA could be used, I suppose: add some kind of bogus
encryption/access control mechanism, threaten users with five years in
jail if they go around it.  I'd be against such tactics.