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Comment by truiu | Hacker News Reader

The licence (GPLv3) limits its use a bit - at least for people who prefer other licences like BSD or MIT.

The generated C++ source contains the following comment:

// This code is in part copyright Kay Hayen, license GPLv3. This has the consequence that // your must either obtain a commercial license or also publish your original source code // under the same license unless you don't distribute this source or its binary.

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I'm confused by this. I thought the license used by a compiler had no effect on the licenses that could be used for programs compiled by it. If the author of Nuitka is claiming that software compiled by Nuitka is in fact a derivative work of Nuitka, that is indeed very problematic.

That was my immediate assumption too, but part of the compiler's output is going to be some kind of a runtime library. If that itself is GPL 3 and the code generated by the compiler statically links to it, then I'm pretty sure a case could be made that the compiler's output is a derivitive work. Kind of sneaky and non intuitive, though.

This is all way out of my area of expertise, so take it with a grain of salt.

At a very quick glance, I think he's using libpython as the run-time library. However, there is probably some code that would propagate the license, so careful attention needs to be paid there.

This issue is why bison's license contains a special exception for the part(s) of itself it includes in its output. http://www.gnu.org/software/bison/manual/html_node/Condition...

Couldn't you construct such a license?

GCC has a runtime exception for exactly this reason.

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