Re: [avr-chat] Can't Install avr-gcc in FreeBSD

[Joerg Wunsch]

David Brown <address@hidden> wrote:

> For some port developers, the requirement of assigning copyright to
> the FSF is too much (this could be one of the reasons why Altera,
> Xilinx, and Microchip keep their ports outside the tree, but it's
> unlikely to be a reason for the msp430 people since the msp430
> binutils port is inside the FSF tree).

I agree about commercial entities here.  Personally, I think it's one
of the most arguable policies of the FSF, and it even runs into
curious situations.  For example, I signed the copyright assignment
for GCC, binutils, and GDB since the FSF insists on it, yet this
assignment is completely void.  According to our German rules, the
copyright is inherently bound to the person creating something, and
cannot be transferred at all.  (It can be inherited only.)

OTOH, even a commercial entity developing parts of GCC is bound to the
rules of the GPL anyway, so it's kinda questionable as well to not go
the final step, and hand everything over to the tree.

> I see many open source projects moving from cygwin to mingw for
> precisely this reason (mingw has less run-time overheads, which is a
> bonus), and this progress has made my life much easier.

Well, for sure, everything that can run under MinGW should be used
that way.  After all, it's then using the native Win32 API, rather
than an emulated Posix API.

Unfortunately, for some programs (like AVaRICE), this would
essentially affect their entire operation, and thus require a rewrite.
Other programs (like AVRDUDE) share a good common part of
API-independent code, so they have been ported to the Win32 API years
ago.

-- 
cheers, J"org               .-.-.   --... ...--   -.. .  DL8DTL

http://www.sax.de/~joerg/                        NIC: JW11-RIPE
Never trust an operating system you don't have sources for. ;-)