Octocontrabass wrote:
kerravon wrote:
I don't know what you're talking about. I feed it my C code and it produces assembler code. It's transforming my code. I am basically familiar with what my assembler code looks like, and it matches my C code.
And how does GCC know what assembler code looks like? Its own source code includes values that get copied directly into the output. The transformation includes both your own C code and GCC's source code.
kerravon wrote:
Regardless, to answer your specific question - no-one actually knows. The (undisputed) copyright holder can take me to court anytime he/she wants, on whim, and it will be for a court to decide (largely on whim too).
That's why the GCC license explicitly gives you permission to do whatever you want with any parts that may still be covered by GCC developers' copyright in the resulting binary, including the statically-linked libgcc.
No, it's very different. The GCC license doesn't cover the generated assembler at all, at least in my reading of the 7,592 license conditions. You postulated a possibility that they could claim copyright on the generated code anyway, and you are correct. And no, it won't be down to YOUR interpretation of what the GCC license allows. It will be up to some random judge in some random country who has never written a line of code in his life.
Quote:
kerravon wrote:
Which is why I intend to move to a public domain compiler when available.
A public domain compiler isn't going to rely on libgcc in the first place, so writing your own public domain replacement would be a waste of time.
No. A public domain compiler is going to take care of the issue you mentioned of the generated code. It is highly unlikely that a judge is going to agree to that interpretation if the compiler author chooses to have fun with me. But no-one knows for sure. The replacement libgcc functions serve a different purpose - allowing me to use GCC as the compiler, which I believe is pretty safe, but to eliminate the UNDISPUTED copyrighted libgcc code that would otherwise be linked in to the executable and thus comes down to whim.
Note that the public domain C compiler I am still struggling to obtain won't be anywhere remotely near as good as GCC, so there will still be a reason to use GCC. The GCC that I use (3.2.3) is 400,000 lines of C90-compliant code (after I made changes to achieve that). When SubC or similar comes online, it will be maybe 8 or 9,000 lines of code.