Proposal for e-mail to SC list about licensing questions for libquad.

[Toon Moene]

Hi All,

Here is my shot at the e-mail to the Steering Committee mailing list 
about the licensing questions surrounding FX's effort to provide 
gfortran with a run-time library capable of quad precision (16 byte, 128 
bit) floating point arithmetic.

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Subject: Licensing questions on a new part of the gfortran run time
          library enabling quad precision (16 byte, 128 bit) floating
          point arithmetic.

Francois-Xavier Coudert, a long time contributor to gfortran, has 
written a patch for the Fortran Front End that enables the compiler to 
generate code for 16 byte / 128 bit floating point arithmetic, on 
targets where "long double" means "10 byte / 80 bit floating point".

For the accompanying routines in the run time library, the gfortran 
group has some questions on licensing.  Here is his description where 
various parts come from:

1. "some of the math code comes from Cephes; it has liberal licencing,
    and was included into glibc under the LGPL"

2. "the rest of the math code comes from fdlibm, with very liberal
    licencing"

3. "the gdtoa code licencing is also pretty liberal; it's already used
    in a variety of projects"

The questions are as follows:

Part 1.  This part is owned by the FSF, so the simple question is: can
          this (modified) code be relicensed under the GPL + exception
          clause used for GCC's run time libraries ?

Part 2.  See: http://www.netlib.org/fdlibm

and

Part 3.  See: http://cvsweb.netbsd.org/bsdweb.cgi/src/lib/libc/gdtoa/

          are distributed under the BSD license.  Can we import them
          into the Fortran run time library ?

Kind regards,

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The problem I currently have is that it is hard to *prove* that fdlibm 
and gdtoa are distributed under the BSD license (and exactly which one) 
- I cannot find a document that contains the exact license text.

Comments will be integrated until Thursday, 00 UTC - it will be sent 
shortly after.

Thanks and kind regards,

-- 
Toon Moene - e-mail: toon@moene.org - phone: +31 346 214290
Saturnushof 14, 3738 XG  Maartensdijk, The Netherlands
At home: http://moene.org/~toon/; weather: http://moene.org/~hirlam/
Progress of GNU Fortran: http://gcc.gnu.org/wiki/GFortran#news