6 ms·

The biggest news is probably the fact that it's BSD licensed. Having some GPL parts had driven me away from newlib before.

by Ecco 7y ago

delinka 7y ago
If I were in the market for such a library, I'd still have serious concerns. The GPL license still appears in the root of the repo as if the entire codebase might be subject to GPL; It appears to be a fork of newlib (GPL) and that means it might not qualify as a "clean room implementation" of GPL'd code - the legal team in a corporation is going to insist on a ton of due diligence on Picolibc before they allow it to be used.
- AWildC182 7y ago
  Or we could stop mindlessly releasing closed source encrypted firmware?
- derefr 7y ago
  Quoting the README: > Remove[d] unused code with non-BSD licenses. There's still a pile of unused code hanging around, but all non-BSD licensed bits have been removed to make the licensing situation clear. Picolibc is BSD licensed. From my understanding, Newlib is a GPL-licensed project that has some GPL-licensed contributions and some BSD-licensed contributions (in the sense that these aren't original code written by contributors, but rather are copy-and-paste inclusions of pieces from various GPL- and BSD-licensed codebases.) The author created Picolibc by (doing the moral equivalent of) cherry-picking out a small base of the commits to Newlib—all of which were copy-and-pastes from BSD-licensed codebases. --- In some sense, Newlib is very similar to how a Linux distro works, repackaging upstream code components (of various licenses) together. Picolibc, then, would be a lot like creating a new Linux distro, derived "from" Ubuntu, that happens to use only the packages in Ubuntu that are themselves directly copied in from upstream Debian (pretending for a moment that Ubuntu does this rather than re-signing packages with their own keys.) Is such a distro really "derived from Ubuntu"? Or is it derived "from" Debian, with an Ubuntu mirror server just serving as a pipe that some Debian packages went through on their trip "from" Debian's hands "into" the hands of the new distro? --- Either way, worries that the GPL could infect this effort are misplaced—even if it comes to a legal battle, at any point, the same codebase could be recreated (with a bit of a schlep) by just going to all the same BSD-licensed upstream sources that Newlib's contributors pulled from, and doing the same copy-and-pasting that Newlib's contributors did.
enriquto 7y ago
you license fanatics are so annoying...
- bpt3 7y ago
  There's nothing annoying about understanding how you're allowed to use something created by another person, especially when legal liability is involved.
- dang 7y ago
  Please don't post unsubstantive comments here, especially not nasty ones, regardless of how annoying other commenters are. Otherwise we all go down an annoyance spiral. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

The biggest news is probably the fact that it's BSD licensed. Having some GPL parts had driven me away from newlib before.

by Ecco 7y ago

The biggest news is probably the fact that it's BSD licensed. Having some GPL parts had driven me away from newlib before.

delinka 7y ago

If I were in the market for such a library, I'd still have serious concerns. The GPL license still appears in the root of the repo as if the entire codebase might be subject to GPL; It appears to be a fork of newlib (GPL) and that means it might not qualify as a "clean room implementation" of GPL'd code - the legal team in a corporation is going to insist on a ton of due diligence on Picolibc before they allow it to be used.

AWildC182 7y ago
Or we could stop mindlessly releasing closed source encrypted firmware?
derefr 7y ago
Quoting the README: > Remove[d] unused code with non-BSD licenses. There's still a pile of unused code hanging around, but all non-BSD licensed bits have been removed to make the licensing situation clear. Picolibc is BSD licensed. From my understanding, Newlib is a GPL-licensed project that has some GPL-licensed contributions and some BSD-licensed contributions (in the sense that these aren't original code written by contributors, but rather are copy-and-paste inclusions of pieces from various GPL- and BSD-licensed codebases.) The author created Picolibc by (doing the moral equivalent of) cherry-picking out a small base of the commits to Newlib—all of which were copy-and-pastes from BSD-licensed codebases. --- In some sense, Newlib is very similar to how a Linux distro works, repackaging upstream code components (of various licenses) together. Picolibc, then, would be a lot like creating a new Linux distro, derived "from" Ubuntu, that happens to use only the packages in Ubuntu that are themselves directly copied in from upstream Debian (pretending for a moment that Ubuntu does this rather than re-signing packages with their own keys.) Is such a distro really "derived from Ubuntu"? Or is it derived "from" Debian, with an Ubuntu mirror server just serving as a pipe that some Debian packages went through on their trip "from" Debian's hands "into" the hands of the new distro? --- Either way, worries that the GPL could infect this effort are misplaced—even if it comes to a legal battle, at any point, the same codebase could be recreated (with a bit of a schlep) by just going to all the same BSD-licensed upstream sources that Newlib's contributors pulled from, and doing the same copy-and-pasting that Newlib's contributors did.

enriquto 7y ago

you license fanatics are so annoying...

bpt3 7y ago
There's nothing annoying about understanding how you're allowed to use something created by another person, especially when legal liability is involved.
dang 7y ago
Please don't post unsubstantive comments here, especially not nasty ones, regardless of how annoying other commenters are. Otherwise we all go down an annoyance spiral. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html