Providing 'hsdis' binaries not possible because of GPLv2/GPLv3 license clash

[Chris Newland]

Hi Dalibor,

Firstly, apologies for the snark in my previous email.

I've also been looking into alternative decompilers and found this:
http://fcml-lib.com/index.html

It's LGPL which in my understanding would be OK to distribute (not looking
for confirmation).

Possibly less useful than the binutils disassembler as it's x86 / x86_64
only (Making an assumption that binutils works with JIT-produced ARM,
sparc, MIPS, etc.)

Ultimately, if you care about the disassembly out of more than curiosity
then you've probably got the brains to build hsdis yourself.

I'll try and give both of the above a test and report back.

Cheers,

Chris

On Mon, June 1, 2015 17:35, dalibor topic wrote:
> On 28.05.2015 16:01, Volker Simonis wrote:
>
>> Chris has pointed out a real problem of the current project: it is not
>> possible to provide binaries of a part of the project (i.e. 'hsdis')
>> because of licensing issues.
>
> Hi Volker,
>
>
> I appreciate your concern here, and accordingly spent some time doing a
> bit of research over the weekend.
>
> As far as I understand, the third party library in question has been
> traditionally distributed under a license arrangement very similar to that
> of hsdis. While I understand that at some point in time the vendor of that
> third party library changed their license preference for future releases,
> I have not been able to deduce from this thread why that
> change of preference makes it impossible to use an older release of that
> library published under a similar license arrangement to hsdis for your
> purpose.
>
> Better understanding this would help with the justification of the
> relicensing request as it appears on the surface that the status quo is if
> not fine, then at most mildly inconvenient.
>
>> @Chris: reimplementing  the hsdis functionality is probably the most
>> pragmatic solution but I'd rather like to avoid code duplication here to
>> avoid problems with different incompatible version in the future.
>
> Fwiw, I think LLVM MC might be (more?) interesting to consider in that
> regard in general. [0]
>
> cheers, dalibor topic
>
> [0] http://blog.llvm.org/2010/01/x86-disassembler.html
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