[Aldor-l] Compiler development

[Bill Page]

On 2008/6/15 Pippijn van Steenhoven wrote::
>
> tonight, I have restarted my work on the compiler ...

Excellent!

> ...
> Is anybody actually still developing Aldor or does anybody have a
> clue about the compiler internals? I'll have uploaded the code I have
> here to
> svn://svn.xinutec.org/aldor/trunk

This links seems dead.

> It does not include the changes I made before tonight. It does not
> include the make scripts either, since they are not license-compatible
> with the APLv2. (Would it be possible to use SVN external
> repositories and just let svn fetch the required files without those
> being license-compatible?)
>

I think the answer is "yes". Provided that you are not re-distributing
a modified version of Aldor under a different license, I do not think
that there is any problem to make aldor-related source code separately
available under what ever license you choose. (If I am wrong about
this, I hope someone more knowledgeable about the actual intention of
APLv2 will correct me.) Of course at some point this is likely to get
rather inconvenient if there are many changes and dependencies on
specific versions of the Aldor distribution.

> Regarding license issues, I no longer care about it. If the Aldor
> Software Organisation wants the "royalty-free" "unrestricted" right
> to modify and redistribute my changes, that would only be good,
> since it would mean there are actually people out there besides me
> who care about the quality of the compiler.
>

Certainly there are a significant number of people who care about the
quality of the Aldor compiler, so yes do I think that is a reasonable
take on the issue - it allows work to continue. Of course there is
still reason to wish that the Aldor Software Organization and any
remaining interests at NAG and IBM would simply agree to the
re-licensing of Aldor under GPL. I do believe that such a change would
make Aldor more attractive to a much wider group of potential
developers and users. GPL (or something compatible with GPL) meets the
needs of almost all other open source compiler development projects.
Like it or not, choosing anything else seems only to invite confusion
and raise red flags with both users and developers.

Regards,
Bill Page.