On Tue, Aug 30, 2011 at 11:14 AM, Greg KH <gregkh@xxxxxxx> wrote: > On Mon, Aug 29, 2011 at 06:42:57PM -0700, Henry Ptasinski wrote: >> The brcmsmac driver has architectural alignment with our drivers for other >> operating systems, and we intend to to enhance and maintain this driver in >> parallel with drivers for other operating systems. Maintaining alignment >> between our Linux driver and drivers for other operating systems allows us to >> leverage feature and chip support across all platforms. > > Just curious, if you really are going to try to do this, how are you > going to handle the issue when others change the in-kernel driver in > ways that you are not going to be allowed to make to your "internal" > copy of the driver? What do you mean by this? > Also, how are you going to handle any GPL-only changes that happen to > the code as well? For the broadcom drivers this may be hard if people want to move GPLv2 b43 code to a permissively licensed driver... but ... > Do you have some process in place to ensure that all > contributions will have the proper copyright releases on it to allow you > to make the same changes to your internal versions? To be clear *new* code going in to a permissively licensed driver follows the Developer's Certificate of Origin which does state the contributor follows the file's license. Back in the hay day we thought this was not enough and introduced a Changes-licensed-under tag but a few upstream maintainers were not fans of it given that they did believe the Developer's Certificate of Origin with the Signed-off-by was enough for it. This is in fact accurate, but only if you educate your developers to ensure they do know what the Signed-off-by means and that they have read the Developer's Certificate of Origin. We take care to repeat this to new contributors to our permissively licensed drivers and would gladly help Broadcom in doing this as well. The issues with a large GPLv2 code from b43 and the fact that the other driver is permissively licensed makes this a bit more complicated though, but that is only a reflection of not addressing supporting old hardware. Ouch. > This all is a very difficult and time-consuming task, are you sure you > are all up to it and have properly discussed it with your legal team, > management team, and with the kernel community? As I see it the only difficult aspect here is large GPLv2 codebase on b43. The rest requires just education on the Developer's Certificate or Origin, otherwise we could not share between Linux and the BSD families, as we had done before with other subsystems, not only wireless. Luis -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-wireless" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
