jbuck@galileo.berkeley.edu (Joe Buck) (06/18/90)
In article <1990Jun17.171247.13705@kth.se> d88-jwa@nada.kth.se (Jon W{tte) writes: >Follow-up flames to alt.religion.computers. Sorry, Jon, I won't honor your Followup-To when you post false information. >> How 'bout gnu c++, available at most good ftp stops. >Only, it is covered by the gnu public license/virus, and you >might want to be careful about how you use it, and for what. >The term "free" is defined differently by the FSF than by many >other people. The code produced by g++ is not covered by the Gnu license. You may sell code compiled by g++, as long as you do not use libg++, the Gnu library, or any of the #include files provided by FSF. (Authority for this statement: Michael Tiemann, author of Gnu C++). This means that you must provide your own startup module and streams library. This would be an onerous task, except that Stanford has already done it. If you want to use g++ and not be constrained by the Gnu license, get InterViews from Stanford (ftp'able from site "interviews.stanford.edu"). Don't install libg++ -- you may also need to do some work to get the libraries to show up in the right places. The InterViews code may be included in products for sale. Also, the InterViews documentation contains an explanation of what they did to guarantee that InterViews, when built with g++, is not covered by the Gnu license. (InterViews is a C++ interface to the X window system). Also, if you want to sell your executable code, you can't use bison (the FSF yacc substitute) because the parser it produces is mainly FSF source code. I'm really tired of the whining about FSF. They've provided the world good, free tools and the conditions are not onerous. >As long as you're not going to use this compiler for a large >commercial project, you're safe. Read the license first ! It is possible to use the compiler for a commercial project. FSF is also planning to relax conditions on library use to encourage use of Gnu tools by hardware manufacturers (though they will never allow vendor X to sell a proprietary C or C++ compiler for the X computer based on Gnu); the exact details aren't settled yet. They still mean to undermine what they call the "software hoarding" industry but they are getting more pragmatic about how to proceed. :-) -- -- Joe Buck jbuck@ohm.berkeley.edu {uunet,ucbvax}!ohm.berkeley.edu!jbuck