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That is just plain untrue under any lay interpretation of your statement. Are you perhaps talking about not being able to open source a work statically linked

by Veserv 3y ago

That is just plain untrue under any lay interpretation of your statement. Are you perhaps talking about not being able to open source a work statically linked to proprietary libraries (with or without library source code) such as compiler libraries? The general problem with that is that such a work would be a derivative work [1]. If you are using a copyleft license that would mean you would be required to disclose the source code of all components including the source code of the library you received. If you do not have a license to distribute and relicense that library, it would be copyright infringement to disclose and relicense it under the copyleft license. You can not both statically link a proprietary source code library and release the derivative work under a copyleft license; that is inherently incompatible. [1] https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#GPLInProprietarySystem https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#GPLInProprietarySy...

AlotOfReading 3y ago
It has nothing to do with copyright or linking. The default green hills contract contains a clause restricting your usage of the toolchain to build code that competes or replaces their other offerings, because they want don't want you avoiding their upsells.
- Veserv 3y ago
  From what I remember, it does not. I think your legal counsel did a overly-broad reading of some clause or combination of clauses. Given that you keep bringing up open source and mentioned code that you yourselves open sourced, it was probably a copyleft linking clause and your lawyers erred on the side of caution (as lawyers do). To the point, unless you avoided linking the default proprietary compiler libraries (such as the C lib) any work you open sourced under a copyleft license and distributed would be in violation of the copyleft license as you and your downstream would be unable to legally supply the source code to those libraries. You could avoid this by explicitly linking a copyleft compatible library like glibc instead of the default proprietary libraries, but I suspect your lawyers did not want to deal with the hassle of validating conformance. Much easier to just say you can not use it on open source products. This is a general problem when dealing with proprietary software components/libraries, just most people have little familiarity with that since the proprietary library industry largely died since developers do not want to pay for their software dependencies.
  - AlotOfReading 3y ago
    Look, there's not much more I can tell you without just posting the proposed contract and their clarifications that yes, they really did mean that. I'm not talking about linking. The terms don't apply solely to OSS code, but that's the most important thing restricted as far as anyone here is concerned.

by Veserv 3y ago

AlotOfReading 3y ago

It has nothing to do with copyright or linking. The default green hills contract contains a clause restricting your usage of the toolchain to build code that competes or replaces their other offerings, because they want don't want you avoiding their upsells.

Veserv 3y ago
From what I remember, it does not. I think your legal counsel did a overly-broad reading of some clause or combination of clauses. Given that you keep bringing up open source and mentioned code that you yourselves open sourced, it was probably a copyleft linking clause and your lawyers erred on the side of caution (as lawyers do). To the point, unless you avoided linking the default proprietary compiler libraries (such as the C lib) any work you open sourced under a copyleft license and distributed would be in violation of the copyleft license as you and your downstream would be unable to legally supply the source code to those libraries. You could avoid this by explicitly linking a copyleft compatible library like glibc instead of the default proprietary libraries, but I suspect your lawyers did not want to deal with the hassle of validating conformance. Much easier to just say you can not use it on open source products. This is a general problem when dealing with proprietary software components/libraries, just most people have little familiarity with that since the proprietary library industry largely died since developers do not want to pay for their software dependencies.
- AlotOfReading 3y ago
  Look, there's not much more I can tell you without just posting the proposed contract and their clarifications that yes, they really did mean that. I'm not talking about linking. The terms don't apply solely to OSS code, but that's the most important thing restricted as far as anyone here is concerned.