Re: [avr-libc-dev] Re: Revised release criteria for GCC 4.0

[Ralf Corsepius]

On Fri, 2004-12-17 at 00:42 +0100, Bernardo Innocenti wrote:
> Bernardo Innocenti wrote:
> > Joerg Wunsch wrote:
> 
> >>What's their CVS [commit] access policy?
> > 
> > gcc/binutils/gdb rules are very strict.  All developers
> > must sign FSF papers before you legally significant
> > patches can be committed.
> > 
> > After a few good patches have been approved and committed
> > by regular maintainers, a developer can ask for CVS write
> > access and get an account.  He's still required to get
> > non-obvious patches reviewed and approved before committing.
> > 
> > Newlib is perhaps not subject to the same rules.  It's even
> > under a BSDish license.  Judging from CVS activity, it receives
> > very little new development, but of course it's being bugfixed
> > and maintained as needed to keep it working on all supported
> > targets.
> 
> Looking at newlib's home-page (http://sources.redhat.com/newlib/),
> I see newlib's contribution policy is much friendlier than the
> typical FSF project:
FWIW: newlib maintained and hosted by Red Hat.
ATM, newlib's main users are Cygwin, RTEMS and bare embedded targets.
Due to the nature of these systems, newlib's licensing is much more
liberal than that of FSF projects.

In contrary, GPL or LGPL'ed code can not be merged into newlib because
this would prevent this code to be applicable with Cygwin (RH/Cygwin
proprietary license) and RTEMS (In general LGPL with exceptions to allow
static linkage in closed source).

> Reading through the mailing-list, though, it appears they use
> a kind of formal review/approval process similar to GCC's.
> (which I don't dislike at all, I recommend it to any project
> because it greatly increases code quality).
Exactly. However, the final authority is Red Hat.

Ralf