This is the mail archive of the ecos-maintainers@sources.redhat.com mailing list for the eCos project.


Index Nav: [Date Index] [Subject Index] [Author Index] [Thread Index]
Message Nav: [Date Prev] [Date Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next]
Other format: [Raw text]

Re: drivers with proprietary code


Mark Salter wrote:
Not really. I haven't thought about distributing it. What I was thinking
was that the library copyright holder would distribute the driver. They
already have a mechanism for a user of their part to get the library
source code. I was thinking along the lines of them also offering a
.epk package with the driver.

Ah, okay.


One interesting problem is if the driver is *both* derived from eCos, i.e. using anything GPL+exception, and this library. If it is, then the two licenses are incompatible and it could never be distributed *at all*.


If he's lucky, Mark might have based it off a driver that is still 100% (C) Red Hat, in which case Mark can ask RH legal (or whatever responsible company officer) for permission to alter the licence of that driver to something more liberal and thus compatible e.g. non-advertising clause BSD licence.

I don't think I have a problem there, but correct me if I'm wrong. This driver is so unlike an other because the driver interfaces to a library, not to hardware. The library API actually fits pretty well with the existing eCos eth driver structure. So, the eCos driver sources that I created were not based on anything beyond the driver API function protoypes.

Using *just* the prototypes associated with an API may be considered "fair use" since there's only really one way to do an API. But I'm not sure about this, and IANAL.


I know for sure the FSF has taken the position that you can't just get round, say, the LGPL by adding code that the LGPL code is absolutely dependent on. A reasonably clear equivalent in eCos would be if, for example, someone wrote a new HAL but tried to get round the GPL by say having a HAL that at one point called my_proprietary_stuff() in a different file not covered by the GPL+exception. While it is a separate file, it is difficult to argue that it is a different work, in the legal sense, and the FSF have certainly been fairly clear about that, since the alternative would be an easy workaround for a lot of LGPL stuff. And similarly the GPL+exception is pretty close to the LGPL in this respect and would potentially suffer the same problem.

None of this has been tested in court of course :-). It's one of the classic grey areas of the GPL.

Now, for something like an ethernet driver, there is (pretty much) a defined API, and indeed the function prototypes pretty much directly follow from that (although care should be taken about copying even comments!). However for anything more we have to be pretty clear about the origin of the code... or more interestingly the origin of the *idea* of the code, since it is intellectual property we are talking about.

If you copy code directly, it's cut and dried - it's GPL+ex. But it's also a problem even if you just used the old code as a guide for how to write the new code. Sitting here, without seeing the code in question it's difficult to judge if that's the case of course!

For example, it's now essentially impossible to create a new HAL that isn't GPL+exception since the standard way to do ports is to base it off another one. Even if you only kept the "API" definitions and substituted in new content, if you used the old content as a guide for how to write new content, you would have legal problems. People just *remembering* how other HALs are written would be a problem. Witness the problems with tainting and Sun JAVA.

You would instead need to write a new "clean room" HAL from scratch using only documented API functions.

Now, I did do a copy/paste/edit to get the driver .cdl file. So maybe
there is an issue there. I don't know. It doesn't get mixed with the
proprietary pieces, so I think I'm okay.

Yes that would be okay, although the "code" for that .cdl file (by itself!) would have to be shipped with any binaries as per the GPL+exception licence as it was still used as a "script used to control compilation" thus falling under Section 3 of the GPL.


I wouldn't have such a big issue with a separate EPK in the FTP area with an accompanying README and so on, because people are more likely to read the README there than just use a package out of CVS without considering the licence properly.

I also didn't consider a CVS repository for this code other than a local one that I use. The distributed code would just be an EPK and maybe prebuilt RedBoot binaries for some boards. These would be kept on the manufacturer's site, not s.r.c. I don't think we want to have any proprietary stuff with distribution restrictions there.

Right okay.


And to answer Gary:
I wasn't suggesting that we try to include this in the common CVS
at all.

I guessed probably not, although I thought you might want to set up a separate parallel CVS tree on s.r.c for "non-official-licence" code, e.g. code we never got assignments for, or fully GPL'd stuff. This is something that we might want to consider down the road with full caveat emptor warnings of course - I've certainly talked about it before as a possibility (which I'm not 100% about myself either); but I definitely didn't want to go this route without a way to notifying people about what licence a package _is_ under, so no-one can fail to notice that something is e.g. full GPL.


Jifl
--
eCosCentric    http://www.eCosCentric.com/    The eCos and RedBoot experts
--[ "You can complain because roses have thorns, or you ]--
--[  can rejoice because thorns have roses." -Lincoln   ]-- Opinions==mine


Index Nav: [Date Index] [Subject Index] [Author Index] [Thread Index]
Message Nav: [Date Prev] [Date Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next]