One of the reasons I am drawn to Haiku is the MIT license. IMHO, the use of the GPLv3 license (in GCC version 4.3 and all beyond) reduces MIT code that links to GPLv3 code to the lowest common denominator, which is GPLv3 licensed code.
The FreeBSD project is currently wrestling with this same conundrum. Thus far, they are staying with GCC version 4.2.1 (last GPLv2), and some of them are attempting to push the Clang/LLVM compiler project to the point where it will self-host FreeBSD. In fact, I think that they have successfully done this, but not to the point of production.
Has anyone brought up the idea of Clang/LLVM for Haiku?
I had not heard that the use of gcc4.3.x would cause any sort of license issues of this sort - please forward me to any documentation that suggests this so I can review it and raise the concerns in the proper channels for the Haiku developers.
It was always my understanding that the shared libraries provided by GCC are covered under LGPL, and the GCC license itself doesn’t affect software compiled with it. It sounds like this is some kind of anti-GPL FUD…
In any case, Clang/LLVM has been discussed a couple of times on the mailing lists - but last I heard it wasn’t yet suitable for full scale usage as it was very much still in development.
I would be willing to experiment with it on one of my build systems if it was reasonably easy to setup.
The reason you haven’t heard of any license issues between gcc 4.3.x and mit is because there isn’t any. The freebsd choice of sticking with 4.2.1 is political as it has no practical impact on their distribution, also gcc 4.3 is available for freebsd from ports. ron scheckelhoff is obviously just a licence troll here to spew some anti-license-X fud (dude, get a life). As for llvm it’s certainly an interesting project, but sofar it seems too much a work in progress. And when I say interesting I mean interesting technically, not due to licensing. Haiku is a wonderful project, and which open source license it uses is in my opinion the least interesting thing about it.
Well, I’m glad I’m not the only one that suspected this is FUD
In any case, I’m not sure ron is necessarily a troll, in these situations, I’ve noticed that people tend to repeat what they hear elsewhere, and with all of the FUD about GPL floating around, there’s a lot of people who don’t always investigate and come to their own conclusions.
If using GCC under GPLv3 caused the resulting code it compiled to be also licensed under GPLv3, I suspect a lot of commercial, closed-source companies would be in deep doo-doo right now simply because they upgraded to a newer version of GNU/Linux which used a newer GCC. Those distributions of Linux would have no choice but to downgrade their GCC as such, and then newer GCC versions would never even get used commercially. There would be a major fork in GCC due to licensing concerns, and the entire world would know it by now…
It just doesn’t hold water when you consider what the consequences of such an action would be.
