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Debian/OW ... FASM (Announce)

posted by ecm Homepage E-mail, Düsseldorf, Germany, 12.09.2010, 14:29

> How can you require someone to submit their changes without you having
> changed any of the code itself? I mean legally, you really think that's
> possible? I think you can only optionally license your own additions as
> GPL, which means the whole must be "GPL-compatible", right? The original
> bits would still remain as-is.
No. Although you cannot change the license used by the original project (f.e. official NASM build), you can pretty much copy all their code, then license that fork as GPL. This means anyone who would then obtain their code from your fork would have to use the GPL, but anyone who got the official NASM build still would get it under their license.

The "you need to modify it" part is moot, if not generally, then because of this: I take all the NASM source code. I change file A to include 3 lines of code it did not have. I license the fork as GPL. I change file A to remove the 3 new lines. So even if anyone insisted I need to change some of the code, there's a simple workaround for that. (There are licenses that say you ain't allowed to redistribute a program with the same source code as the official build with a different license or at all, preventing this workaround. These licenses are not considered free by the FSF.)

Besides, you have to change 50+ of NASM's source files to include a different license header anyway so that's already some work there. :-D

> The Sybase license is much more confusing and worse, by far.
True, but I still don't like the FASM license.

> But if he doesn't prevent people from not sharing their modifications, I
> guess he doesn't want anybody else forcing that upon them either.
The GPL allows you not to distribute modifications, you just mustn't distribute the binaries either. That is, anyone who gets one of your binaries (from you or someone else) has the right to get the (modified) source, but no one else.

But I see there is a valid difference here.

(Besides, you might argue that FASM's Copyleft is weak because it is not stated that combining stuff with the FASM code means that this other stuff has to be made available.)

> FASM is a 32-bit assembler and only runs on 32-bit, not 16-bit. [Blah]
Yes, I know. That's why I said "ostensibly". And "targets".

> NASM 2.07 was first to be BSD-licensed, and it's not that old, so FASM
> couldn't verbatim (well, you know what I mean) borrow from it anyways until
> then, esp. since Tomasz prefers pure x86 assembly in lieu of C.
* It was available as of the 2009-07-06 release (2.07rc1) or earlier.
* Since he would rewrite everything anyway, he could have just read their (LGPL) code or asked someone to do that to compile a documentation of the format, then implement that in FASM. This is of course moot now that the code is free.

> It doesn't have priority to FASM's author because NASM, ArrowASM, LZASM,
> WASM, JWASM, Wolfware w/ macros, TASM, MASM, A86, Optasm?, etc. etc. all
> already support it.
But that would mean these assemblers are better for some tasks than FASM. Heheheheh.

---
l

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