3 ms·

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 co

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.

3 ms·

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 co

by AlotOfReading 3y ago

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.