Building hsdis?

[Andrew Haley]

On 24/12/17 12:16, Volker Simonis wrote:
> Andrew Haley <aph at redhat.com> schrieb am So. 24. Dez. 2017 um 09:27:
> 
>> On 23/12/17 17:02, Volker Simonis wrote:
>>> Andrew Haley <aph at redhat.com> schrieb am Sa. 23. Dez. 2017 um 12:25:
>>
>> The GB can only solve problems which, in principle, can be solved.  I
>> know of no reasonable way to solve this one.  There are some extreme
>> solutions, such as re-licensing all of HotSpot, but that seems
>> disproportionate.
> 
> There’a no need for any “extreme” solutions here. We’re speaking about 2
> (in words “two”) files (i.e. src/utils/hsdis/hsdis.{c,h}) which are neither
> part of the normal build nor part of any OpenJDK distribution. You have to
> call the Makefile under src/utils/hsdis/ manually in order to build
> hsdis.so. But this links in a part of the GNU binutils (which has been
> relicensed to GPLv3) into the generated shared library. So currently,
> everybody who builds hsdis violates the GNU license because he combines
> GPLv2 with GPLv3 code.
>
> I simply don’t understand what’s so complicated in relicensing these two
> hsdis.{c,h} files to GPLv3? Just to stress it one more time: they are NOT
> part of the HotSpot or the JDK. They are just a tool which can be used to
> anslyze some HotSpot internals.

IANAL, but AFAIK It would not help.  The incompatibility is because
you can't link pure GPLv2 code (HotSpot) and pure GPLv3 code
(binutils) together, even via dynamic linkage.  Changing the licences
of hsdis.{c,h}) won't solve that problem.

-- 
Andrew Haley
Java Platform Lead Engineer
Red Hat UK Ltd. <https://www.redhat.com>
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