3 ms·
Ask HN: GPL side-effects of aliasing GCC to LLVM
Does the fact that the 'gcc' command aliases to clang on my mac laptop make clang a derivative work of GCC?
- dalke 11y agoNo. The concept of "derivative work" is based on copyright law, which requires some sort of creativity. A name is not protected by copyright law.
- awinter-py 11y agoThe gcc command isn't just a name, it's an API. And though I'm sure the FSF wouldn't troll the legal system by claiming their API is copyrightable, the federal court system has been pretty split on the question.
- ectoplasm 11y agoWhy is the gcc command an API?
- awinter-py 11y agoIt has parameterized inputs and outputs specified by documentation.
- dalke 11y agoAhh, yes, your point is that the entirety of the command-line parameters may be under copyright, not just the alias. The FSF would be against this view as it would imply that a GNU system needs permission from POSIX to implement "ls -l" or "cc -c", or if not something that simple, then a sufficiently complex/"creative" command-line API. Therefore even if the court are undecided, the FSF is not going to make a copyright claim for linking the command 'gcc' to clang.