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FASM's license (Announce)

posted by Rugxulo Homepage, Usono, 12.09.2010, 22:18

> 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.
I don't think so. Well, even for public domain, how could you? Their code is their code, their (original) copyright. I'm not saying I'd care or complain, but it seems backwards to re-license something you didn't write. That code should remain under the same license, it's only being compatible for the rest of the project that's legally important.

> 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.
I doubt it. Besides, BSD vs. GPL ... GPL loves BSD, but BSD hates GPL, so nobody would prefer GPL except diehards, esp. if it was only blindly re-licensed and not by original authors / copyright holders. (Honestly I wonder why anybody cares AT ALL about stupid licenses, they are so boring! Code is code, why is it so hard for people to share and accept?)

> 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.

I don't think that would count. Even though in theory you should be able to extract the original, in practice it's not always easy. But they could always just get the original anyways, assuming they knew that it existed (and where to grab it).

EDIT: I think GCC will allegedly accept 20 lines or less without copyright assignment but nothing greater.

> (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.)
The FSF also dislikes clauses preventing non-commercial use, and yet I've seen a few "GPL" apps add that restriction.

> 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
Well, the functionality stays the same. Truly, I honestly think (legally) you're only allowed to re-license your own changes. I think the "whole" of the project can be GPL even if 99% is BSD licensed.

(But I'm no lawyer though I'll admit I don't care what they think, they can invent any crazy idea, and it's insane to pretend I'll just comply blindly to whatever some crackpot can come up with. Different countries have different laws anyways, so there's no pleasing everybody.)

> > The Sybase license is much more confusing and worse, by far.
>
> True, but I still don't like the FASM license.
Why, because you can't re-license it (do you really want to??) or because it's "yet another" license that the world didn't need? The world doesn't truly "need" FASM, but it's a truly awesome tool, a good compliment to NASM, IMHO.

> (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.)
I don't think Tomasz intends to restrict anyone from doing anything with it, including proprietary changes, which would indeed not work if it was GPL. (However, AFAICT, nobody has made any sizable changes to it except for Fresh, FASMARM, Wink ... and you can easily live without any of that).

> > 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".
In other words, 32-bit was the initial mindset, even if he did / does love DOS and DOS Navigator heavily.

> > 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.
Honestly, I think he has looked at NASM before, but obviously he's rewritten everything to suit his own ways of doing things (different macros, always did opcode size reduction similar to YASM, different algorithms).

> > 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.
Yes, of course, since there are too many object and executable formats out there, and no one assembler or linker supports them all (though NASM tries pretty hard). Clearly Tomasz has no problem writing apps (DOS, Win32, Linux) completely in pure assembly. It shouldn't be that surprising. ;-)

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