On Mon, Mar 24, 2025 at 2:45 PM Matthew Woehlke via legal legal@lists.fedoraproject.org wrote:
Portions of GCC are distributed under the following license:
==================================================== Copyright (C) 1993 by Sun Microsystems, Inc. All rights reserved.
Developed at SunPro, a Sun Microsystems, Inc. business. Permission to use, copy, modify, and distribute this software is freely granted, provided that this notice is preserved. ====================================================
However, this notice does not seem to exist anywhere in binary distributions. I suspect the *intent* was similar to a BSD-style license, and my impression is that corporate lawyers tend to argue for that interpretation; i.e. "preserved" means that the notice is present somewhere in derivative works. Upstream, however, seems to feel that the notice is "preserved" because it hasn't been removed from the source file, i.e. it is *not* necessary to include the notice in binary distributions or other derived works.
If I ship compiled code which includes code under the above license, what are my obligations? Do I need to include the above notice? Can I omit it entirely? Something else?
(See also https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=2353932.)
I can't give you legal advice but: (1) I think "preserved" ought to be read as meaning "it has to be included even if you distribute a binary" and (2) if you simultaneously make source code available in the same manner as your binary distribution, that requirement to "preserve" is satisfied.
Richard