New 'as' port: GPL requirements?

[Alan Modra]

On Tue, Nov 08, 2005 at 10:16:38AM +0000, John Moran wrote:
> Daniel Jacobowitz wrote:
> 
> >This conversation is _OFF TOPIC_ for this list.  Please take it
> >somewhere else. 
> 
> I would like to develop 'gas', but its licence terms may not make this 
> possible. It seemed to me that this would be a suitable place to find 
> out before proceeding on to specific technical matters. My apologies if 
> I was mistaken.

Indeed, this is the right place to ask about technical matters relating
to binutils.  It just isn't the right place for endless discussions
about the merits and application of the GPL.  For some reason this sort
of discussion appeals to many, thus Daniel felt it necessary to
discourage the discussion here with some force.  I'm sure he didn't mean
it as a personal attack.

Now, even if the GPL were not a problem for you, and there wasn't the
political/philosophical question of discouraging the use of proprietary
software, I'd still be against the idea of linking a target specific
object library into binutils.  It would be a maintenance nightmare.
Consider that binutils is hosted on many different architectures.  You'd
need to provide your library for each host architecture, or limit
support to some small number of hosts.  Any binutils developer without
access to one of the supported hosts wouldn't be able to test changes
that might break your target.

-- 
Alan Modra
IBM OzLabs - Linux Technology Centre