This question has been long pondering customers who are using our GCC for Renesas toolchains. We therefore present the licensing models attached to each library in use, below.

Please feel free to ask us any additional questions you may have, either directly on our forum, or through a private support ticket.

• Newlib
  • This library is governed by a collection of licenses, which are BSD, or BSD-alike.
  • All these licenses are listed in license.txt (part 8 and part 9) in the toolchain, and may also be found at: https://sourceware.org/newlib/COPYING.NEWLIB
  • According to this licensing model’s statement (“Permission to use, copy, modify, and distribute this software for any purpose without fee is hereby granted …”), the library may also be used in proprietary software without any licensing issues.
• Libgcc, libstdc++
  • All GCC libraries fall under the GPLv3 exception: “The GCC Runtime Library Exception covers any file that has a notice in its license headers stating that the exception applies. This includes libgcc, libstdc++, libgomp, libdecnumber, libgcov, and other libraries distributed with GCC.”
  • Does this mean that any program which uses libstdc++ falls under GPL, automatically? No, a special exception permits use of the library in proprietary applications, as outlined in https://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/libstdc++/manual/license.html: “When you use GCC to compile a program, GCC may combine portions of certain GCC header files and runtime libraries with the compiled program. The purpose of this Exception is to allow compilation of non-GPL (including proprietary) programs to use, in this way, the header files and runtime libraries covered by this Exception.”
• Optlib
  • This is a library whose copyright belongs to Renesas.