Re: gdbstubs library posted at sourceforge

["John M. Mills" <jmills at tga dot com>]

b.g.-

On Fri, 28 Jan 2000, William Gatliff wrote:
> Actually, that's a good question.  The following are my concerns, which I
> think the LGPL addresses, although not perfectly.  I'm open to differing
> opinions and suggestions, though, as I'm no expert:
> 
> 
>    * I want to encourage leaving the stubs in production embedded systems
>    * I don't want to force users to divulge the non-gdbstubs parts of their
>      application if they don't want to
>    * I want to avoid proprietary, closed-source modifications to the stubs;
>      minor tweaks to overcome hardware and security issues are fine, but
>      nothing that makes it work better with gdb than the public sources
>    * I want to encourage contributions to the stubs
>    * I don't want someone turning gdbstubs itself into a closed source
>      product (particularly the tracepoint stuff, when it arrives)

We have no problem using your stubs because you have chosen LGPL. If they
were straight GPL, it would be a much harder case around here, requiring a
much closer look. We have no problem devoting effort to improve a LGPL
release and then contributing what we may have done, but we will not
release product-specific code, and must clearly separate the two.

Interestingly, my reading of the license of our semiconductor
manufacturer's embedded development environment would have precluded using
it on LGPL (or GPL) releases [or at least could not use the more helpful
parts of their package]: we did not purchase it because we are basing
an upcoming product series on a RTOS which is covered by the LGPL.
Fortunately we are well served by the GNU toolset.

Thanks very much for your contribution.

  John Mills, Sr. Software Engineer
  TGA Technologies, Inc.
  100 Pinnacle Way, Suite 140
  Norcross, GA 30071-3633
  e-mail: jmills@tga.com
  Phone: 770-441-2100 ext.124 (voice)
         770-449-7740 (FAX)