NI 'gccdist' redistribution

Technical Programming
1

Does anyone know if it’s legal to mirror the ‘gccdist’ available from NI (link)? For the installer of the alternate GCC toolchain I need to download the vxworks headers, but currently doing that pulls in the entire toolchain, which is a HUGE waste of bandwidth and can significantly increase the install time over slow internet connections. I’d like to take out just the header files and mirror those, but I’m not sure of the legality.

It seems like those files are copyright of WindRiver, so I don’t know if there’s anyone here who can answer this question, but they’re distributed by NI, and I’m not sure how that partnership works in terms of relicensing/sublicensing if at all.

2

This seems more like a question you should be asking NI through some formal channel than posting on a forum.

3

Yes, but I’m not sure what “formal channel” I would use…

I was thinking there might be a chance the UCPP people would know.

4

ni.com/support is pretty official. Or you could try the ni.com/frc page and search for a discussion on the topic – perhaps create your own.

Greg McKaskle

5

I created a thread on NI’s FRC forum.

Alex Brinister

6

a link to that post: https://decibel.ni.com/content/thread/16508?tstart=0

7

No joy on that front. Alex and I have both tried calling NI but we no longer qualify for phone support since it is not build season. We can also try WRS, but that seems like an uphill battle from the start…

8

Because I haven’t gotten anything back, I’m going to steam ahead, interpreting:

Standalone copies of the free GNU tool chain for VxWorks 6.1 and 6.3 are attached to this document. (emphasis mine)

to mean that all the files contained in the zip files are “free” and available under GPL. Is it a stretch? Maybe, but if NI or WRS wants to sue me they really need to find more work for their legal team…

9

Yes, of course. GCC is licensed GPLv3. Because of that, you could even sell NI’s distribution of GCC. (Don’t do that though. That would be evil.)

Edit: I forgot something. vxWorks is trademarked by NI. This means that NI is the only legal distributor of vxWorks binaries/source. You should be legally fine as long as you don’t make modifications, so mirroring is ok.

10

I’m not worried about GCC itself, I’m worried about the other files in that package…

Also, VxWorks is a trademark of WindRiver, not NI. NI holds trademark over cRIO.

11

Whoops. Didn’t do my research there.

With GCC, I was referring to the copyleft portion of the GPL license. That zip is a derived work of GCC. It is distributed under similar conditions.

12

Yes, the GCC binaries are. However, the status of the WRS header files, miscellaneous build scripts, resources, documentation, etc. is not quite so clear.