@vathpela@glyph At any rate if the behavior in question has been halted for unrelated reasons it seems hard to come to a firm conclusion about whether it was entirely legal?
@mcc@glyph I think that's a fair conclusion. Also worth noting that there are other slightly different ways they could have done it that are even more confusing (and maybe they did, I wasn't ever in that part of the business). Like, what if they only ever gave the customers patches, and then rented them out a consultant who downloaded, patched, and compiled gcc for them? It's exactly the same in the end, but a largely different thing being handed over.
@vathpela@mcc thanks again for stepping in so I wasn't spreading around false claims. I still think the whole scheme sounds confusing and dubious, but now at least I know where to go to do research to understand it better in the future!
@glyph@mcc Also worth keeping in mind that this was like 25 years ago, I didn't work in that part of the company (or indeed for Cygnus ever), I've never paid someone to write a compiler port for me, and it would be remarkable if I didn't have at least some part of this history wrong ;)
@vathpela@glyph Hrm, well, now that you mention it, I think there might actually *be* a very dangerous patch distribution loophole to the GPL, I'm willing to hear that argument. Especially since I've ALSO seen an almost identical loophole used by people who ADVOCATE the gpl (see "LAME"..)
@mcc@glyph I think the argument against that is that a patch to a piece of software must be, at least in some part, a derived work. (Also I have written a lot of GPL'd software. ;)
Gregory's Server
@mcc @glyph I think that's a fair conclusion. Also worth noting that there are other slightly different ways they could have done it that are even more confusing (and maybe they did, I wasn't ever in that part of the business). Like, what if they only ever gave the customers patches, and then rented them out a consultant who downloaded, patched, and compiled gcc for them? It's exactly the same in the end, but a largely different thing being handed over.