Ok ... so that was quick, I looked up the guy doing most of the commits and asked him. Here his reply:
"As with majority of the compilers (gcc, clang, etc), Kaitai Struct compiler does not make any special takes on the output. If you own the input, you totally own the output, and free to specify your own conditions on its licensing. If you use something from our formats repo — http://formats.kaitai.io/ — it's generally safe to assume that output license equals to KSY input file license (of course, I'm not a lawyer, I can't provide legal advice, blah, blah, etc, the regular disclaimer you've probably seen tons of times already). As most of formats in that repo are CC0-licensed, basically it's public domain, you can do whatever you want with them." So if we input a definition which we write as part of the PLC4X project and which is naturally Apache 2.0, so the output would be Apache 2.0 too ... so that sounds good. Unfortunately he also told me that even if the parsing code was already good, the serialization code is in very early stages and would probably not be up to our expectations :-( So we probably shouldn't base our project on that ... but thanks for the fast response Richard :-) Chris Am 09.01.19, 16:26 schrieb "Richard Eckart de Castilho" <r...@apache.org>: Hi Chris, This seems to be a similar situation as for tools such as automake (which I believe is used by several Apache projects). To the best of my knowledge (I am not a lawyer), the the copyleft clause of the GPLv3 does not impose and restrictions on the output of tools under the license. E.g. if you have a text editor published under GPLv3, the copyleft doesn't affect to the texts you have written with it. In the case of a code generator (like a compiler or like automake) you'd best check if the generated output contains anything that is licensed under the problematic license. For example, the compiler might generate a boot loader block into every application and this boot loader block might be under a copyleft license - that could be a problem. For this reason, e.g. automake has special exceptions to the GPLv3: https://www.gnu.org/licenses/exceptions.en.html If the compiler you want to use does not mention any such exceptions as part of their FAQ/license description, maybe best enter into contact with the developers and ask them. Cheers, -- Richard > On 9. Jan 2019, at 15:53, Christofer Dutz <christofer.d...@c-ware.de> wrote: > > Hi all, > > I just double checked the text on the GPLv3 compatibility. > Stupid thing is the problem I’m having isn’t really covered by that [1]. > > The case I’m currently having is that there is a toolset called Kaitai [2], which sounds interesting for the Apache PLC4X project. > In general you define a data-format and have it generate model, serializer and parser in multiple languages (Similar to Thrift or Protobuf, but with a focus on the transport data-format and not the model). > > This consists of a compiler and a runtime. > > The compiler generates code from sources which use the runtime libraries. > The runtime libraries are Apache 2.0 and MIT licensed, so this would be ok > The compiler however is GPLv3 … > > Now we would not be bunding the compiler and the users wouldn’t need to use it when using PLC4X as it’s only needed in the code-generation phase of the build. > > So before I throw the idea over board, I just wanted to double-check this special case. > > Chris > > > > [1] https://www.apache.org/licenses/GPL-compatibility.html > [2] https://kaitai.io/ > --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: general-unsubscr...@incubator.apache.org For additional commands, e-mail: general-h...@incubator.apache.org
