Re: Device Tree Blob (DTB) licence
From: David Lang
Date: Fri May 29 2015 - 18:19:59 EST
On Fri, 29 May 2015, Enrico Weigelt, metux IT consult wrote:
And why should they fear "poisoning" ?
Search for "GPL contamination", the problem is quite common, GPL
can turn anything GPL-compatible into GPL. So for a non-GPL project
it's very hard to adopt GPL code.
Yes, that's the whole purpose of the GPL. The deal is pretty simple:
if you take some GPL'ed software and change it, you'll have to publish
your changes under the same rules. For entirely separate entities
(eg. dedicated programs) that's not an big issue. And for libraries,
we have LGPL.
If the DTS license would be a problem, it would be worse w/ ACPI
and any proprietary firmware/BIOSes.
not true, with a proprietary bios it's a clear "pay this much money and don't
worry about it" while with GPL there's a nagging fear that someone you never
heard of may sue you a decade from now claiming you need to give them the source
to your OS.
Is having the DTB GPL so impartant that you would rather let things fall into
the windows trap ("well it booted windows, so it must be right") instead of
allowing a proprietary OS to use your description of the hardware?
note, this whole discussion assumes that the DTB is even copyrightable. Since
it's intended to be strictly a functional description of what the hardware is
able to do, that could be questioned
David Lang
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