Building hsdis?

[Andrew Haley]

On 27/12/17 11:26, Volker Simonis wrote:
> There are two different problems here:
> 
> 1. It is not possible to build and redistribute hsdis.so because of
> GPLv2 and GPLv3 license incompatibilities.
> 
> This problem could be easily solved by re-licensing hsdis.{c,h} under
> GPLv3. That would allow it to others (e.g. the AdoptOpenJD project) to
> provide pre-built version of hsdis.so for various platforms and
> versions of OpenJDK. This will be definitely of great benefit for the
> OpenJDK community, especially taking into account that many popular
> tools like JITwatch or JMH use or depend on hsdis.
>
> 2. The second problem is wether and when a program and its plug-ins
> are considered a single combined program.
> 
> This is a long standing problem [1] and without being a lawyer (which
> is probably an advantage :) I'd consider the usage of hsdis a
> "borderline case" (because HotSpot and hsdis dont't share any complex,
> common data structures - they just pass a byte stream forth and back).
> But that's just my opinion.

Right, but there is substantial functionality which depends on binutils.

> We can not easily solve or decide problem 2. But we can resolve the
> first problem and give everybody the freedom to decide question 2
> for himself.

I believe that anybody distributing the resulting hsdis.so would be on
shaky legal ground.  Maybe it'd work in some countries, not others, I
don't know, but we shouldn't be trying to find clever schemes to evade
the clear intent of the FSF, the binutils copyright owner.

> Without resolving the first problem (i.e. re-licensing hsdis.{c,h}
> under GPLv3) most people won't even face problem two (if this is a
> problem at all) because they simply don't have a version of hsdis.

We need to seek a better way to solve this problem.

Neither of us are lawyers, but I don't like it, and I would be very
reluctant to be involved with any organization trying to get past
the FSF's copyright terms in this way.

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