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by MaxBarraclough 3061 days ago
If you really wanted to, I imagine you could write a proprietary compiler that generated some serialisation of one of GCC's IRs (GENERIC or GIMPLE), and you could write a deserialiser for GCC that reads in that IR. Release the deserialiser under GPL, then you can legally use GCC as the backend for your proprietary compiler.

This sort of IPC-like hackery often seems to happen when someone is looking to work around copyleft - they can then break the spirit of the GPL without breaking the legal obligations.
2 comments
favorited 3061 days ago
That's not too far from how the the first LLVM frontend worked, IIUC. llvm-gcc was a GCC fork (pre-Clang) that produced LLVM bitcode or IR. That IR would be fed into an LLVM backend for code generation.
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pertymcpert 3061 days ago
You would still need to use gcc code to operate on the deserialized IR, which is GPL. Unless you then transform the IR into a proprietary one, in which case that's not breaking the spirit of the GPL.
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MaxBarraclough 3061 days ago
> You would still need to use gcc code to operate on the deserialized IR, which is GPL

The GPL's terms would not extend to the program that generated the IR.

A GPL web server can't require a web browser to relicense under GPL, either. Same idea.

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sjwright 3061 days ago
By your logic, every single bit of code that has passed through gcc is now GPL licensed.
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