Re: [PATCH 03/16] staging: m57621-mmc: delete driver from the tree.

From: NeilBrown
Date: Tue Apr 02 2019 - 15:52:02 EST


On Tue, Apr 02 2019, George Hilliard wrote:

> On Tue, Apr 2, 2019, 5:32 AM Greg Kroah-Hartman <gregkh@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
> wrote:
>
>> The license text in this driver is "interesting" and not really obvious
>> that it is supposed to be able to be distributed in the kernel source
>> tree. Yes, the MODULE_LICENSE() text says GPL, so it's probably ok, but
>> to be safe, I am deleting this driver. I will be glad to add it back if
>> the license is properly sorted out, but for now, this isn't worth the
>> potential risk, I should have never taken it in the first place.
>>
>
> So, for what it's worth, this driver has an obvious heritage of having been
> modified from the main Mediatek MMC driver. Now, of course it's *possible*
> to distribute GPL-incompatible changes to a GPL program, but the only
> *compliant* way to distribute these changes would have been the GPL.
>
> So there's a very good chance that it's intended to be GPL. (Which is
> good, because I need this driver!) I suppose we need to reach out to the
> original contributor.

People keep telling me that drivers/mmc/host/mtk-sd.c should be able to
handle the same hardware as this driver, with a little bit of work.
Unfortunately they haven't told me what the little bit of work involves.

Have you explored that possibility at all? I might try to have a look
if I can make time.

NeilBrown

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