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SubjectRe: Linux on Merced
Date
From
Alex Belits wrote:
>
> On Fri, 31 Oct 1997, Mitch Davis wrote:
>
> > Alex Belits wrote:
> > >
> > > It's very unlikely that HP will want to make their version of gcc and
> > > not release it because:
> > >
> > > 1. It will violate GPL.
> >
> > I would argue the opposite.
> >
> > It violates the GPL only if they were to release gcc purely in binary
> > form. If they ported gcc, they could in good conscience keep it to
> > themselves.
> >
> > Keeping it to themselves would be a pretty unsociable thing to do if
> > it ever came to pass, but they'd be allowed.
>
> IMHO It will be so if HP didn't have employees. Employees' NDA combined
> with internal modified gcc use will produce violation of GPL, not just
> having (and not using) modified gcc: employee can use modified gcc only
> for his work for the company and can't distribute it while original gcc
> was obtained under condition that any modified version if given to
> someone, should be given under the same license that original one was
> received.
>
> Of course, not being a lawyer I may be wrong -- I can imagine that for
> some strange and obscure reason employee's contract and NDA can't be
> considered to always include a kind of very restrictive license for using
> company's property and resources for the company's benefit, but I don't
> see any such reason.

Come on,

My company can take gnuinfo, modify two lines, and use that
internally. My company is just "one person". Next door they have 5
employees. They can also modify gnuplot, and use that internally. HP
is slightly larger, and is also allowed to modify gcc, and use that
internally.

Now in reality, Intel probably modfied gcc, and is very willing to
give the changes back to the fsf community, but the gnu people
sometimes reject the ugly hacks that Intel makes to gcc, simply
because they are ugly, or because they don't fit into the current
version. This happened to the Intel 960 port of the gcc compiler.


By the way, "explicit parallelism" is something that Intel should have
bad experience with: The Intel 860 processor supported that. This was
a flop because hand-generated code was reasonable, while compilers
simply didn't benefit from the parallelism that they could specify....
(if you use just one out of two pipelines in a parallel instruction
you loose memory bandwidth for getting the "nops" , so you do need to
get at least some degree of filling to compensate for that.)







--
** R.E.Wolff@BitWizard.nl ** +31-15-2137555 ** http://www.BitWizard.nl/ **
Florida -- A 39 year old construction worker woke up this morning when a
109-car freight train drove over him. According to the police the man was
drunk. The man himself claims he slipped while walking the dog. 080897

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