10 years ago when ATmegas were still around and your 32 bit variable was generating 3 instructions for addition I would say „right on“ but now everything is a 32 bit Cortex-M and please stop polluting your code with this nonsense
Please understand, I am still in a position where I am writing new code for a platform which only has one compiler, a proprietary fork of GCC from nearly 20 years ago. I assume other C programmers might have similar situations.
I think it's not a GPL violation if you keep the fork non-public.
Though I'm entirely sure not when something is considered private or public. You can obviously make changes to a GPL repo, compile it and run the executable yourself and just never release the source code.
But what happens when you start sharing the executable with your friends, or confine it to a company?
"I made this GCC fork with some awesome features. You can contact me at [email protected] if you're intere$ted ;)"
My understanding is that the GPL only requires the source code to be made available on request for at least 3 years (or as long as you support the software, if more than 3 years). If you want to require people who want the source to write to you via the Post Office and pay shipping+handling+cost of a disc to receive the source code, I believe this is permitted by the GPL as long as you don't profit off of the cost.
Of course, for almost all practical cases, the source code for a GPLed program is made available as a download off the Internet because the mail order disc route seems really archaic these days and probably would be removed altogether in a GPL version 4 if some prominent company used this loophole to evade the spirit of the GPL. Either that or somebody would jump through your hoops to get the source and just stick it on a public GitHub repo. If you then DMCA that repo, you'd be in violation of the GPL.
If you share an GPLed executable with your friends or with other people at a company, then they'd presumably be able to request the source code. But if you run a Cloud GCC service with your fork, you could get away with keeping your source code proprietary because GCC isn't under AGPL.
All the GPL says on source code access is that you need to make the source code available to whoever you distributed your program to. If the program never leaves a closed circle of people, neither does the source code.
For example, Microchip XC16 [1]. It is GCC with changes to support their PIC processors. Some of the changes introduce bugs, for example (at least as of v1.31) the linker would copy the input linker script to a temporary location while handling includes or other pre-processor macros in the linker script. Of course if you happen to run two instances at exactly the same time one of them fails.
As far as the licensing part goes they give you the source code, but last time I tried I could not get it to compile. Kind of lame and sketchy in my opinion.
