On Monday 04 August 2014, Russell King - ARM Linux wrote: > On Mon, Aug 04, 2014 at 09:25:10PM +0200, Maxime Ripard wrote: > > On Sun, Aug 03, 2014 at 07:59:27PM +0200, Arnd Bergmann wrote: > > > I would actually prefer if we could migrate a lot of these files to BSD license, > > > provided the original authors agree. We want the dtb blobs to be embeddable into > > > boot loaders of any license. > > > > Even though I'd be open to having my contributions to DTBs under the > > BSD, is this really a thing? > > > > I mean, for all I know, an OS/Bootloader would just parse a documented > > binary file, and I don't see any derivative work there. > > How does the OS/Bootloader end up with that binary file? > > For the sake of argument, let's say that the BSDs want to move to DT on > ARM. Great, they convert over to parsing our DT blobs. They already do, at least FreeBSD. > However, they can't distribute the binary DT blobs to their users without > coming up against the problems of the GPL wrt binary distribution. > > They could distribute the source files, but remember that many of those > are currently GPL licensed, so they'd probably end up having to package > them entirely separately, if they're willing to do that at all. > > Or they could decide to ignore us altogether, and do their own DT stuff, > maybe partially implementing our properties, or maybe coming up with > different and/or incompatible properties - which would be bad because > we now end up with two ways to describe the same hardware in active use. I think this is exactly what is happening on the platforms that FreeBSD first adopted DT on. > I suspect the final option is the one they'd choose, and it's in our > interest that that doesn't happen. Right, or at least not have it spread to other platforms. Arnd -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe devicetree" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
