datwill310 wrote:sancho2 wrote:datwill310 wrote:Isn't that illegal?
This is a terrible way to phrase it.
No it is not illegal. Nowhere is it illegal.
Does it violate the PB EULA, possibly. But that does not make it "illegal".
I am sorry to have used this phrase: I'm not all too educated in that area (I didn't know that most copyright law infringements were not illegal). I was wrong in bringing in a whole other language into this forum as well.
Copyright infringement is illegal and can result in legal action against an organization. At the very least, site takedown requests can be executed through formal legal channels. That being said, Python is licensed under the Python Software Foundation License, which is BSD-compatible. The same goes for CPython, the most widely used production Python compiler and reference implementation of the Python language and runtime.
The BSD license is very permissive, and nothing mentioned in this thread would be illegal under BSD license terms. Generally speaking, if something is licensed under BSD or MIT licenses, you can pretty much do anything with that intellectual property, including building proprietary extensions and binaries.
As far as building Python in FreeBASIC, I don't see why this would be a difficult thing to do. Just take CPython's source, which is available here:
https://github.com/python/cpython or official:
https://hg.python.org/cpython
And translate that to FreeBASIC.
Here are instructions for getting CPython and starting development:
https://docs.python.org/devguide/setup.html
You could possibly even just send the source of CPython along the distributions and worry only about header translations. You could include binaries for Windows distributions, while Linux and Mac OS users would be able to compile CPython out-of-the-box. (Thanks to Chocolatey and other tools now available on Windows, Windows users might only need a shell script to install Chocolatey and then everything else is automated.)
The rest could be done via an interface between FreeBASIC and Python.
I don't know much about Cython, but that would be something else worth looking into:
http://cython.org/
A motivation I could see for the community wanting to do this is embeddable FreeBASIC, although I thought some community members had already done work on getting FreeBASIC to run in interpreted / JIT environments (like in a web browser). Python is a vastly different language from FreeBASIC, however, so serious modifications would be necessary to produce FreeBASIC or even a near-equivalent from a pre-existing Python compiler and bytecode interpreter.
Might be better to find a minimal compiler + bytecode interpreter project and adapt FreeBASIC to that instead. Python is fairly evolved and even depends a lot on its own evolutions. An example is the Global Interpreter Lock (
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_interpreter_lock) which could be seen by some FreeBASIC users as extremely limiting (although both Python and Ruby have one and are doing just fine).