Sunday, January 27, 2008

X68k+LGPL

When I got the relation to Public Domain Software, my main PC was X68000 (made by SHARP) that is one of the best PC in Japan PC's history. X68000 had an excellent architecture, the best world to enjoy creations and the same spec as GENESIS to develop a video game. Many programers learned programing with X68000 and most of them became a video game programer. I'm one of them.

There are two C compilers in X68k that are XC(*)+XCLIB (SHARP SDK) and gcc+libc. SHARP SDK was not free, but gcc+libc was free. We, X68k programers had released many free software but had not considered licenses. The most popular combination was gcc+XCLIB. gcc was able to optimize programs than XC. And, XCLIB is smaller than libc because XCLIB was written by the machine language. We had liked the gcc+XCLIB combination that programers who did not have SHARP SDK could not compile. For that, most programers prepared better makefile to compile programs with both of SHARP SDK and gcc+libc.

(*) This XC is not XOOPS Cube. We called X68k C compiler "XC".

PDS(Public Domain Software) was known, but "Open Source" was not defined yet. But programers loved freedom and knew what programers should do.

However, most X68k programers did not use dynamic link to use libraries. If a program links libc with static link, the program has to be LGPL. If the license of the program can not be linked with LGPL, that's the actions that are not allowed. Also it is not allowed to link XCLIB to programs having GPL/LGPL code.

We may have made small boo-boo. But, our world was really freedom. I think our world did not have a problem. You may call such a world anarchy. That was really open, even if there were not GPL/LGPL.

2 comments:

ピーク後藤 said...

Yes!

Still, I'm loving X68k.
We are children of "freedom".

Of course, I had made many programs by gcc (mariko version) + xclib.

I believe LGPL or GPL is just a weapon against anti-freedom companies/people.
Like a needle of a honeybee.

Honeybees never use the needle against another honeybees.

randomshinichi said...

Hey, I found your blog while searching for the Sharp X68000. It seems to be very desirable and I find it very attractive - do you know where I can find one? Not even eBay Japan has one!

Unlike everybody else out there, I'm not interested in the X68K as a games platform.