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Re: A basic question regarding [eCos] performance figures


> Now porting eCos to a new platform you need to write
> a HAL. Basically all HALs are very similar. To write

> a HAL you copy the most similar HAL and modify it to

> your needs. Doing this you have used GPL code, so
> your new HAL has to be distributed under GPL.
If i understand it a little, this means by default you
don't have to give out the sources in this case, but
if customer asks you have to, else every new hal port
by ecos maintainers would need to be available to
public, if they also practice same for new hals rather
than writing from scratch everytime. reasons for this
arise from a quoted reply, further in this post.
please correct my misunderstandings.

can customer distribute/share this obtained source
code with rest of the world?? i.e. i bought a piece of
hardware for which eCos port was available, binaries
were given to me by vendor, i asked for sources and
those wer given to me (GPL stuff), though those were
not available in public repository for whatsoever
commercial reasons. can i share this code with world
w/o getting into any hassles with vendor?

> I doubt there is enought information in the eCos
> Porting guide to writing a HAL without looking at
> other HALs. So in practice you will probably first 
> have to spend a long time actually documenting what
a 
> HAL does, so that you can do a clean room
> implementation.
Whatever little i understand of eCos, to summarise,
non-hal code expects certain functionalities from hal
accessible via  predefined
macro/function/variable/configuration names. it is
quite possible, as discussed in one of the recent
threads, a rewrite (writing from scratch) could be
very much similar/same to the original, also a writing
from scratch could end very much similar to some
similar platform, because of the conventions to be
followed and similarity in platforms.

if you take a similar hal code and modify it to suit
your needs, this is modification. but what if someone
opens existing similar platform's hal in one window,
while all the time completely referring to it - but
not  using original source files for modification -
keying all manually. can (and if yes, how?) GPL laws
pin such cases.

moresoever if some company is closed source, they have
derived from open-source GPL code. but since nobody
gets to see the source, nobody knows about it. In what
ways GPL tackles this situation.

on similar note, I wonder how interests of community
are protected - when as an individual i give out some
some product on an opensource related site (i didn't
care to put GPL and other clauses in that, just made
available to public, when i was on it). for some
reasons this didn't pickup much. some company, in
future, happens to find out some good algorithm/logic
in that, more or less unused now work, and uses that
in some work, patents that logic. will it be an issue
for someone else, who happens to use the same logic
from that work of mine? 

> But in most cases, this is missing the point. The
> eCos HAL is not what differentiates one product from

> its competitors. If your competitors
> gets the HAL it will not really help them. The value

some companies can take various approaches to deal
with their insecurities and some for their
crookedness.

we share some hal that is openly available, you happen
to find some crucial bugs in that and some other
related issues affecting the execution, for which you
do correct fixes and workarounds. I sometimes notice
some weird behaviours in code, but I don't understand
them and do random things to patch/hide bugs rather
than fix those. To be able to fix a bug, first you
have to know it. Both of us develop an application
around our copies of hal. application is closed source
(we are giving binaries). but for evident reasons,
your application turns out to be more stable and
sturdy (reasons could also be that you are a better
programmer  and have even dealt with application code
well). but if the case is of an application based
on/available in open, it makes things easier for me. I
am aware of your hal stability. I need to get hold of
a copy of binary given by you, compare the relevant
sections (assuming i know what is relevant to look
for) of that related with hal code and yeah, i gather
a lot about the fixes you have done.

you were gaining for stability / performance (crashing
and malfunctioning) of your applications, now I too
know some of those secrets.

This is how getting the hal helps the competitors.

sorry about discussion having swayed far from eCos and
into general licensing and issues. this is not the
right forum for these kind of discussions. are you
offhand aware of any right forum/mailing list where
things like this can be discussed.

regards
sandeep



		
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