Re: Original commit history for gfortran

[Ian Lance Taylor <iant at google dot com>]

"C. BergstrÃm" <cbergstrom@pathscale.com> writes:

> 1) What's wrong with commercial software?

I don't want to get into licensing fight, and I don't know anything
about the history of the Fortran frontend, but I do want to suggest a
correction to your wording.  I'm not aware of any GCC contributor who
thinks there is anything wrong with commercial software.  You even
mention commercial companies like Red Hat in your e-mail; Red Hat is a
significant contributor to GCC, along with several other commercial
companies.

What many GCC contributors are concerned about is proprietary software,
a completely different matter.  Code released under the GPL may not be
distributed in a proprietary manner.


> 2) What's wrong if we strip out your contributions (20 patches if I'm
> not mistaken) from g95 and use it in a closed commercial product?
> (See more comments below)

Nothing, if the g95 license permits it.  The only g95 frontend I am
aware of (g95.cvs.sourceforge.net) is distributed under the GPL and is
copyright FSF, and as such would only permit this if you were able to
identify each original author and get their agreement to distribute the
code under another license.


> There's a couple views I can imagine people will have

I can imagine several more, but it's kind of irrelevant with respect to
the g95 frontend in particular.  That code is under whatever license it
is under.


> If you have concerns about PathScale email me privately.  My intention
> is to vet the codebase.  Vetting g95 is relatively easy, but there's a
> chasm between it and gfortran I'm trying to map.  If that's successful
> I'd like to figure out if/how PathScale can contribute.  if we
> continue to get much more negatively this early on (I don't care the
> reason).  I'll just forget the whole thing.

You asked specifically about arith.h.  arith.h is not present in the g95
sourceforge repository.  It is present in the gcc-g95 repository.  The
gcc-g95 repository was created January 6, 2003.  Looking at the revision
of g95.h in the g95 repository immediately prior to that date, revision
1.212 commited January 3, 2003, it is evident that arith.h in the
gcc-g95 repository was created by simply moving some lines from g95.h to
arith.h.  That explains why the copyright date of arith.h is what it is:
it reflects the copyright date of g95.h.  Since this is a simple copy of
information from one file to another, there are no copyright issues
here.

It would have been cleaner if Paul had started with an exact extract of
the g95 repository when he created the g95-gcc repository, but evidently
he did not.  I skimmed the changes between the g95 repository dated
January 1, 2003 and the gcc-g95 repository revision 1.1.  There are many
whitespace and formatting changes, and a bit of code motion, all to
change the code to conform to the GNU coding standards.  I saw no
substantitive changes which would affect the copyright status; however,
I didn't examine the entire diff closely.  Perhaps if you identify other
specific concerns we can allay or corroborate them.

Ian