[copyleft-next] HBR cure for 2013-02-03

Theodore Ts'o tytso at mit.edu
Sun Feb 10 03:43:31 UTC 2013


On Sun, Feb 10, 2013 at 10:20:04AM +0800, "Claes Wallin (韋嘉誠)" wrote:
> >Consider if you will the case of Cygnus Support distributing gcc
> >binaries for Solaris.  Sun stopped shipping a compiler with their OS,
> >so you couldn't build gcc from source unless you paid them $$$ for
> >suncc, or if you obtained a bootstrap gcc binary from somewhere.  But
> >if the gcc binary was linked against the Solaris C library, which was
> >most definitively _not_ licensed under a GPLv2 compatible license, the
> >GPL would need to have some provision where it would be legal to
> >distribute said gcc binary to the Solaris user.
> 
> Fair point, but in this particular case, GCC could have been
> bootstrapped to the point of being self-hosted with glibc, and at
> that point there would be no confusion. Right?

That's assuming that glibc actually worked on Solaris....

>From what I can tell, glibc suffers from the same bug that systemd,
GNOME, etc. all suufer from.  They use vast amounts of autoconf and
libtool to obfuscate and slow down the build process, but then are so
stuffed full of Linux dependencies that it's hard or impossible to
make them work on anything other than Linux.

Clearly we need an update from Henry Spencer's Ten Commandments for C
programmers:

	10.  Thou shalt foreswear, renounce, and abjure the vile
	heresy which claimeth that ``All the world's a VAX'', and have
	no commerce with the benighted heathens who cling to this
	barbarous belief, that the days of thy program may be long
	even though the days of thy current machine be short.

But anyway, this points out pretty clearly why the system library
exemption was needed.

	     	    	     	    	    - Ted


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