Date: Wed, 24 Jan 1996 17:58:47 -0700 (MST) From: Terry Lambert <terry@lambert.org> To: mathezer@newera.ab.ca (Stephen Mathezer) Cc: questions@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Licensing and liability issues for commercial development Message-ID: <199601250058.RAA01392@phaeton.artisoft.com> In-Reply-To: <Pine.HPP.3.91.960123105414.3268A-100000@feisal.newera.ab.ca> from "Stephen Mathezer" at Jan 23, 96 11:01:22 am
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> I'm just curious about how people out there deal with licensing and > liability issues when producing software for FreeBSD. The same way you deal with it for any other platform. 8-). > We produce backup software for many platforms and as such we need to be > concerned about what happens if something breaks. Licensing with gcc is > also a question. > > What if we write software to back up a FreeBSD machine and it gets lost > due to a FreeBSD bug? How can we cover our butts in this situation? Disclaim responsibility for lost and/or damaged data. Just like any other platform. > The Gcc license stipulates that for software compiled with gcc, object > must be made freely available. We don't really want to do that. Plus, > what happens if gcc tightens the license further? No. The GPL refers to use, not utilization. You are allowed to utitilize the compiler to compile whatever you want. You *aren't* allowed to take pieces of the compiler sources and use them in another program without releasing source. The main GPL issue with GCC is use of LGPL'ed libraries. Since FreeBSD provides its own libc, this is really only a problem with some G++ class libraries. The main tenent of LGPL, if this is a problem for you, is that if you use an LGPL'ed library, you must be able to relink it. There are some issues of "code in the header files", but checking the header files before starting will generally save you from that. The main LGPL question is "does a shared library count as a relink". I think the answer is "no", since an interface change like the one BSD made in its syserrlist would prevent relink. This is because the shared library technology that's out there statically links auto initialized data into the program and exports symbols that are then used by the shared library. So to comply with the LGPL, you'd need to ship a .o file that could be relinked with the LGPL'ed libs to rebuild your app. Using "ld -R" should be enough to ensure you only need one .o file for this. This will probably be fixed in later releases by seperating the library code by segment ID in an ELF/COFF/other linker format so that the library data segement can be seperately mapped at runtime. > Basically I'm just curious as to how people out there handle these > issues because we are getting more and more requests to support the free > Unices and are currently refusing them all because of the above > concerns. This is a shame because we use our product in house on FreeBSD > machines and I personally am a fan and run FreeBSD at home but we can't > see a way to support it commercially. FreeBSD should be safe for most uses. Linux is a little more difficult because of the LGPL (do they have a non-LGPL'ed libc?), but you should be able to ship for both systems with no more risk than for commercial platforms, as long as you are careful about libraries, and even then, if you are willing to ship a .o file as well as a linked .exe, even LGPL libraries on Linux shouldn't be an obstacle. > I know we can purchase Motif for FreeBSD. Is there also a commercially > available compiler without the licensing restraints of gcc? There is a compiler in the ports directory. Note once again that since you are utilizing the compiler, not using the compiler sources, you shouldn't have any problems with GCC itself. Hope this clarifies things. Terry Lambert terry@lambert.org --- Any opinions in this posting are my own and not those of my present or previous employers.
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