Posted on May 17, 2011 at 12:17I don't share your belief that I should research more about GPL licensing. I do think that when people expose their personal beliefs they should attach some sort of rationale to them, if the comments are to be meaningful to other people.
I'm not familiar with the status of codesourcery (that IS something I could research if I were so inclined, which I'm not). However, your argument ''if it was not for them the cortex-m3 support in gcc would not exist'' coupled with their need to make a living seems to imply that they are somehow above GPL restrictions.
They are not. It's not what's best for you, it's not give me cortex support please, it's respect the GPL copyright holder's rights. If you can't make a living go sell sausages, but don't steal GPL software. (Besides, ARM would pay for free GCC support for cortex-m3 if needed; or they could just fail to push their core into mainstream, what do I care.)
Note that I'm responding to your argument and not judging codesourcery. I don't have a clue about what they are doing.
I couldn't understand what you meant by ''you pay for what you get''. If you meant ''you get what you pay for'' I have to completely disagree. That's just a silly phrase that people repeat but couldn't be more removed from the truth. The human mind seems to correlate value with price but that is a silly illusion. It takes a lot of work to compare value, so a lot of lazy people just compare price instead. Many companies sell the same product under different names and prices, and many people buy the higher priced brand convinced that it's better, probably misguided by a mixture of marketing and ''you get what you pay for'' thinking.
You can also compare Linux and XP (or worse, Vista) and see for yourself how much of ''you get what you pay for'' is really true. But let's not comment on our personal results on this thread.
Even if ''you get what you pay for'' were true, it'd still be a non issue here. Your desires or needs of higher quality tools would not give codesourcery any rights to steal GPL software.
You say ''to me this is perfectly acceptable, as i said before they have to make a living somehow'' and I respect your view. I encourage you to give away ''better''-than-GPL licenses for your GPL'd code to selected individuals or companies that you feel indebted to, but you of course can't offer rights to code for which you don't own the copyright. Your view of what's acceptable may have strong weight on parts of OpenOCD but it doesn't apply to eclipse/gcc/etc, or my GPL'd code for that matter.
There are many companies in the embedded world that are stealing GPL software. If you're not aware of this and you're interested I could bring up some examples. Of course companies are not evil, they just want to make money. It's up to us to make sure that stealing from the community is a loosing strategy for them. Or be prepared to be robbed.
Best,
Rodrigo
@francis,
Thanks, I'm aware of RIDE7 but I meant free as in freedom (not as in beer). The debug-limited RIDE7 is gratis but not libre. (I've also read reports that RIDE7 hangs up often.)
