Question

Will all of the changes in Sourcery CodeBench be contributed to official source repositories, like those maintained by the Free Software Foundation?

Answer

In general, CodeSourcery contributes all of its changes to components covered by the GNU General Public License and GNU Lesser General Public License (such as the GNU Compiler Collection and the GNU Debugger) to "upstream" repositories.

There are several reasons why this is not always possible:

• The Free Software Foundation requires assignment of copyright interest and CodeSourcery sometimes incorporates code from third parties into its codebase. In that case, CodeSourcery cannot assign copyright interest to the FSF, and therefore cannot contribute the code.
• Some functionality developed by CodeSourcery may not be judged useful by the upstream maintainers. Or, the upstream maintainers may request changes that CodeSourcery does not feel are necessary or that are too costly to make.
• CodeSourcery customers occasionally request that changes that they have sponsored not be contributed, often because the changes relate to CPUs that are not yet publicly available.

There is often a significant delay between functionality being available in a CodeSourcery release and the same functionality being available in an FSF release. After the CodeSourcery release, CodeSourcery must contribute the code change to the FSF, and then the FSF must do its release. FSF release cycles for GCC typically take about a year, so a delay of six months to a year is typical.