From owner-freebsd-hackers Sun Oct 18 23:24:54 1998 Return-Path: Received: (from majordom@localhost) by hub.freebsd.org (8.8.8/8.8.8) id XAA24601 for freebsd-hackers-outgoing; Sun, 18 Oct 1998 23:24:54 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from owner-freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG) Received: from lariat.lariat.org (lariat.lariat.org [206.100.185.2]) by hub.freebsd.org (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id XAA24591 for ; Sun, 18 Oct 1998 23:24:52 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from brett@lariat.org) Received: (from brett@localhost) by lariat.lariat.org (8.8.8/8.8.6) id AAA18939; Mon, 19 Oct 1998 00:24:21 -0600 (MDT) Message-Id: <4.1.19981019000937.06571220@mail.lariat.org> X-Sender: brett@mail.lariat.org X-Mailer: QUALCOMM Windows Eudora Pro Version 4.1 Date: Mon, 19 Oct 1998 00:23:11 -0600 To: hackers@FreeBSD.ORG From: Brett Glass Subject: Producing non-GPLed tools for FreeBSD Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Sender: owner-freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG I'm interested in producing some programming tools that will aid in the development of code for FreeBSD. Unfortunately, when I've asked various people about such things as the object and executable formats, they've all told me that there was no documentation of these things, and that the best way to do this was to UTSL ("Use the source, Luke!"). I was pointed, in particular, to the as(1) assembler and ld(1) linker. Unfortunately, when I looked for the source in the 3.0-current tree, I discovered, to my horror, that both programs were in the /src/gnu subdirectory. This creates a problem. Technically, if I use GPLed source, I must GPL the resulting product. And both as(1) and ld(1) are GPLed. Thus, without descriptions of the output formats that do not require me to read the source code, I can't produce tools that I am 100% sure can be licensed under the Berkeley license and/or sold as commercial products. (This is, perhaps, precisely the sort of "trap" Richard Stallman intended to set when he wrote the GPL in the first place: making it difficult to develop alternatives.) If I'm going to start doing language compilers (and an optimizing assembler) for FreeBSD, I need descriptions of the object format, executable format, register usage conventions, parameter passing conventions, and library conventions that are independent of any GPLed code. How can I obtain these? These would also be required by any commercial developer (say, Green Hills, Borland, or Watcom) who wished to develop tools for FreeBSD, so they wouldn't just be for MY benefit; they're necessary to open up the tools market to ANYONE other than the FSF. --Brett Glass To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message