On Wed, Apr 27, 2005 at 12:50:52PM +0530, Sriharsha Vedurmudi wrote: > Hello all, esp. Dave and Mike, > > sorry to bother you again. To begin with, I apologise for my > incomplete or ambiguous question. I would like to represent my problem > with better clarity. > > Our company (a hardware company) has given a contract to another company > to port gcc onto its proprietory processor. The porting company issued a > contract in which it mentioned everything (all porting work) as 'NON-OS > DEPENDENT FUNCTIONALITY ONLY' (which they call as 'Free-Standing > Implementation'). (First, Im confused if Non-OS Dependent Functionality > and Free-Standing are one and the same?). Finally, they have delivered a > port that consisted of gcc, gdb, gas, binutils, glibc and newlib. But > the functionlity is very limited, meaning we could not do anything like > malloc, printf, strcat, sin, cos, etc. They say that all this is NOT > supported in their Free-Standing implementation (which they have penned > down as Non OS Dependent port). So, were we cheated? I think so because > a port of newlib should mean we can use printf (atleast a stub has to be > there). But I need confirmation on this issue. You're basically asking us to make a legal judgment about the meaning of your contract. That's not what this list is for. If you really want to fight this one you'd need legal advice, but my rough guess based on the facts you present is that they are in the right, and you were not ripped off. The term "free-standing" does appear in standards documents, and it does imply that much of the standard library is not included. It it certainly possible that they didn't supply something that they should have, but we're in no position to help you assess that.
