Meta-Level Compilation project / Introspector/ AST access / Licensing question

[Richard Kenner]

    I should have been more careful when I wrote "Correct."  Should GCC accept
    patches to provide a standard interface that reads and writes compiler
    internals in XML format, with documentation, then it would be hard to
    argue that all readers and writers of the format would need to use GPL
    licensing, because use by external programs would be *intentional*.

This is perhaps the most succint description of why accepting such patches
would be bad that I have ever seen!