QNX Neutrino (new targets, GPL)

[Anders Norlander <anorland at acc dot umu dot se>]

Hi,

I have been working on getting binutils+GCC to work for QNX/Neutrino
realtime platforms (currently only x86 and MIPS targets). QNX/Neutrino is
a posix-conforming ELF-based target so the process was fairly
straight-forward.

I had to do this so we could do win32->neutrino cross-development since
most of our other tools are win32-based. Binutils and GCC are, however,
already ported by QNX themselves. There is even a win32 IDE (CodeWarrior)
for cross-development, but it does not support the targets we need and why
should we pay thousands of dollars to use tools that are free software?

I contacted QNX about their tools since it would be dumb to duplicate the
effort of porting the tools (and they probably have some knowledge that I
don't). But QNX refuses to publish the source code for the modified tools.
They claim it will eventually be available by CVS and that in the meantime
the sources have been put in the hands of the FSF. I don't know if that is
true, but I do know that they are intentionally violating the GPL. They
are aware of the implications of the GPL and they have been distributing
binutils and GCC binaries for a long time, without any source code.

I informed them about this situation and they responded with silence.
Personally I would not mind forcing them to release the sources, but since
my employer is working with QNX that might lead to frosty relations and
that would in turn come down on me.. arrgh, suits!

So I'm uncertain where to go from here. Should I post my patches (we are
using them at work) or should I wait? What if QNX suddenly changed their
minds, although they donīt seem very interested in contributing their
modifications back to the free software community.

Best regards,
Anders