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

"Claes Wallin (韋嘉誠)" copyleft-next at clacke.user.lysator.liu.se
Sun Feb 10 04:53:24 UTC 2013


On 2013-02-10 11:43, Theodore Ts'o wrote:
 > 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.

I only know that before glibc 2.0 it didn't work unpatched on a Linux 
kernel. Today it may well be entrenched in Linux specifics, but that's 
not where it came from. I assumed System V would have been the original 
platform.

 > 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.

It does, I'm just off on a tangent here.

-- 
    /c


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