Re: what DOES the GPL really say?

[ted@telematics.com (Ted Goldblatt)]

In article <hjb-3008970231180001@chaos.dial.idiom.com>,
Hwa-Jin Bae <hjb@pso.com> wrote:
>In practice, the whole GPL issue seems to be pointless.
>For example, Wind River Systems, a maker of VxWorks
>ships modified versions of GDB as part of their
>Tornado products.  Does anyone outside Wind River Systems
>have source code for this special version of GDB?  Nope.
>Do they make it avaialble as part of normal GDB release?
>Nope.  Does Cygnus (who did the work under contract to
>Wind River) make an issue of this fact?  nope.

I question the "Does anyone outside Wind River Systems have source
code for this special version of GDB?" statement.  We use Tornado,
(with no special source license) and _we_ have the source to all of
the modified GNU tools (it was included on the release CDROM).  The
top level source dir includes the normal COPYING file.  An example of
one of the VxWorks specific source files starts off:

   /* MIPS-dependent portions of the RPC protocol
      used with a VxWorks target 
 
   Contributed by Wind River Systems.
 
   This file is part of GDB.
 
   This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify
   it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
   the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or
   (at your option) any later version.

and so on.  It is certainly likely that WRS wouldn't go out of their
way to ship all this to you without you being a customer, but there is
no indication that I see that they would attempt to prevent a customer
from passing it on.  (It's also likely that the changes aren't of much
use to anyone not running Tornado, and since the "current" gdb is 4.16
(I believe) and the latest Tornado ships with a 4.12 variant, I'm not
sure who would want it, but...).

Certainly, they don't seem to ship source for Crosswind, which is
their graphical gdb front-end, but I wouldn't really expect that (much
as I might like it).

I don't want to be a WRS apologist (there's much they do that I don't
like), but this particular brush seems an odd one to tar them with.

ted
-- 
Ted Goldblatt    Ted.Goldblatt@telematics.com     (954) 351-4367
    Telematics Intl., Inc.   Ft. Lauderdale, FL