The usual course is to provide the offer to provide it on physical media for a fee, but kind of implicitly suggest that it would be faster, cheaper, and easier for everyone if you just download it from their website. And most people choose that, unless they want to "test" the publisher or have really bad internet access.
If that same media were actually the case, oh what fun... imagine a gig of sources provided on 200 + little SPI flashes... and you can charge for the cost of soldering them onto a board, programming, and then desoldering them and putting them back in a tube...
Well, yeah. The clause was put in because at the time, there was no ubiquitous web access, so the problem to be solved was keeping the distributor from shipping you a box of 1/2" tape reels when you only had a 1/4" tape drive, or shipping you a CD-ROM when you only had a floppy drive, or (these days) shipping you a floppy when you only have a CD-ROM drive. Or, back then, putting it on a web site when very few people had web access, and that was with a 14.4kb/s modem.
These days, I think "cd-rom" is the default "customary media" - DVD isn't ubiquitous, and although web is popular, you can't guarantee it like you can USmail. IMHO if you usmail the binary, you should be prepared to USmail the sources.
But back then the intention was "however they got the binaries, send the sources the same way". That was the only way to guarantee the sources were readable by the recipient.
FYI all software owned by GNU (which definitely includes gcc) is provided only under the GPL licence. This does not allow use (and release) of that software without releasing the source too. I.e. there is no such 'required license fee' available. Read the GPL license.
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[mail]: Chuck F (cbfalconer at maineline dot net)
[page]:
Try the download section.
The license fee is for the the MIPS architecture itself.
-- John Devereux
Which doesn't affect the gcc situation.
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[mail]: Chuck F (cbfalconer at maineline dot net)
[page]:
Try the download section.
Do you know offhand which define symbol this is? Some messages say the license checking is not in the compiler itself, but rather in the linker. I have looked around in the source but there's a lot of code there and I haven't found this license manager code yet.
I agree that if they are distributing the license checking code then it would appear they aren't violating the GPL.
Eric
It's in gcc/config/pic30/pic30.c. Look for LICENSE_MANAGER.
The linker may have similar code, too.
It's a really short bit of source, too. Exec a child process with some arguments, see what it returns, maybe shut off some options.
I found it. This is not a problem at all.
But what about the C32 compiler for the PIC32? I can't see anything like this there.
The reason I'm asking is because I wanted to try out the PIC32 family but I can't afford the fee to buy the compiler, and a 64K limit is quite small for a 32 bit processor.
If I can't have an unlimited compiler then I'll definitely pass on the PIC32 chip family. The AVR32 has an unrestricted free compiler.
Eric
A code-size limit is likely to be in the linker, not the compiler.
There was no sign, in this comment, that you understood we were discussing two different things. So I thought it worth clarifying.
-- John Devereux
... snip ...
It's not important, but the subject was about GPL, and the previous commentary was about gcc. Sounds like there is no problem. Thanks for taking the trouble.
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[mail]: Chuck F (cbfalconer at maineline dot net)
[page]:
Try the download section.
I found this statement in the Microchip forum:
"if you were over the code-size limit, you would see linker errors indicating that sections were overlapping."
But I looked at the ld source (that came with the c32 source) and I can't find anything about this. I guess they've tried hard to hide that license checking code so people wouldn't try to work around it. There is also apparently no license manager such as that used by the PIC24's C30 compiler (pic24-lm.exe).
Can anyone find the code that checks license keys in the C32 source? The source is here:
Eric
Actually, the original "miffed" is about Microchip charging for the tools versus Atmel not and "I would think MIPS would be rather annoyed about this, assuming they make money on devices sold, not compilers sold." The implication is clear, if you charge for tools you possibly may not sell as many devices as you had hoped.
MIPS have been paid for licensing both core and instruction set, so they have nothing to be grumpy about Microchip selling tools rather than giving them away. That's a business model decision.
I'm well aquainted with the GPL, but this thread diverged to a free-versus-paid argument. I'm sorry you didn't follow it in its entirety.
-- Paul.
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