> -----Original Message----- > From: Vladimir Pantelic [mailto:p...@nt.tu-darmstadt.de] > Sent: Thursday, August 06, 2009 12:41 PM > To: Griffis, Brad > Cc: davinci-linux-open-source > Subject: Re: Montavista Compiler License > > Griffis, Brad wrote: > > Hi all, > > > > Maybe someone from Montavista or anyone else with experience using > Montavista tools can help answer my question. > > > > A customer recently discovered "the hard way" that once your one year > support contract with Montavista expires that > > your compiler ceases to function. The customer's product is more or > less complete, but it could be in production for > > a lengthy amount of time (10 years). During that time it's likely that > a few bug reports will come in and they will > > need to rebuild some things. Normally a customer would expect to fix > the bug and make a firmware update, but that's > > not possible since their compiler is crippled! So what is recommended > in this situation? > > > > In general I think Montavista provides a great service to customers and > to the community. I highly recommend > > Montavista to customers, particularly those customers who are not Linux > gurus. This compiler issue is a bit sticky > > though and I hope there is some kind of clean solution where both > Montavista and our customers can be happy. > > just to be clear, we are speaking about the GCC based (GPL licensed) > toolchain, right? Or a compiler that is not GPL > based and MV wrote themselves? > > customer can always ask MV for the source code, if there is a timebomb > inside, it is a matter of minutes to remove. > > If the MV IDE stops working, so be it, but the GPL toolchain of course > must not... > > Regards, > > Vladimir
Thank you for your reply. Good question. Yes, it's a gcc compiler so it definitely would/should be possible to remove the licensing. It uses FLEXnet licensing so it's probably tougher than some simple time-bomb somewhere. My hope was to avoid cat and mouse games with Montavista. For example, there is a "demo version" of the compiler (without the FLEXnet licensing) that all customers can get for free. I wasn't sure if any improvements were in the real compiler though. Other thoughts I had were potentially dropping use of the Montavista toolchain altogether and using CodeSourcery instead. Would that create other problems? Brad _______________________________________________ Davinci-linux-open-source mailing list Davinci-linux-open-source@linux.davincidsp.com http://linux.davincidsp.com/mailman/listinfo/davinci-linux-open-source
