Re: [ECOS] RedBoot banner

[Jonathan Larmour <jifl at eCosCentric dot com>]

Chris Zimman wrote:
>> RedBoot already had a startup banner. U-boot has never had one I
>> believe.
> 
> It depends on what you call a startup banner.  I personally don't mind name
> of prog and copyright, 
> but anything beyond that non-technical is just unwanted cruft as far as I go.
> 
>> Maybe it might have been different if RedBoot hadn't had such a banner at
> the point it was GPL'd.
> 
> It has a fairly minimal banner as it stands right now.
> 
> Something like: 
> 
> "
> RedBoot(tm) bootstrap and debug environment [ROMRAM]
> Copyright (C) 2000-2009 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
> Platform: PLATFORM NAME (ARM9) 
> RAM: 0x00000000-0x00800000, [0x0002fcc8-0x007dd000] available
> FLASH: 0x04000000-0x041fffff, 4 x 0x8000 blocks, 126 x 0x20000 blocks
> 
> RedBoot>
> "
> 
> ...would be lovely as far as I'm concerned.  I would vote for doing away with
> the 'certified'/'non-certified' thing as well, 
> since it's meaningless in practice to most people.

Agreed. It's a Red Hat hangover.

>> I don't think it's a bad thing for users to be aware of RedBoot's licence
>> anyway. If anyone was worried about read-only data (not RAM) footprint,
>> there are probably many other areas of memory footprint that deserve
>> attention, and you probably wouldn't want to use something as
>> all-encompassing as RedBoot in any case ;).
> 
> OK but just to be clear, as far as I can tell right now, you guys are just
> adding this because you 
> feel like it versus their being an actual requirement for having done so.

I would /like/ it to say it's got the eCos GPL derivative, but I believe it
would be a requirement to comply with 2(c) of the GPL, which implies more
than that.

> Certainly for myself, the consideration is not the memory footprint, it's the
> fact that something 
> redundant is being added to the startup.  Anyone who wants to see the details
> of the license 
> can very easily go look at the GPL.  I don't necessarily need to be reminded
> of it every time the platform starts.

Actually I don't like the verbosity myself either, you seem to be thinking
I do :-).

An alternative is to shove some of this into the 'version' command
specifically so that while a manual invocation of the version command is
more verbose, the banner isn't in which case the banner could be e.g. with
Sergei's example:

RedBoot(tm) bootstrap and debug environment [ROM]
Version UNKNOWN - built 12:06:17, Feb  2 2009

Copyright (C) 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
RedBoot is free software. Type 'version' for license and warranty terms.

Platform: Olimex LPC-H2294 header board (ARM7TDMI-S)
RAM: 0x81000000-0x81100000, [0x81005900-0x810e1000] available
FLASH: 0x80000000-0x803fffff, 8 x 0x2000 blocks, 63 x 0x10000 blocks
RedBoot>

I don't think this is strictly compliant with 2(c) in the letter, but it is
in the spirit and I don't have an issue with it.

Ok compromise?

Jifl
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