crc32, gpl, debuglink, and interoperability.

David Anderson davea42@linuxmail.org
Fri Oct 9 20:59:17 GMT 2020


I'm the maintainer of libdwarf and dwarfdump and wish to
interoperate with gdb/debuglink by reading the appropriate
sections and validating the crc32 when appropriate.

The crc32 used in binutils for debuglink is under plain GPLV3.
Linking to sucn a thing (from what I've been able to find and
somewhat-understand) means the GPL applies to the linked work.
That is not appropriate for the libdwarf library.

So how can I get permission to use LGPL v2.1 (which most of
libdwarf is) or LGPL v3?  on the relevant crc32 function (in
bfd/opncls.c)?  In other words extract the source and apply
an LGPL to the one function calculating the debuglink crc.

At present interoperability with debuglink is impossible  in
libdwarf (so impossible in dwarfdump) and I would like to
make it work.

Thanks for any help or information.
David Anderson


--
Of course power tools and alcohol don't mix.
Everyone knows power tools aren't soluble in alcohol.
-- Crazy Nigel


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