Carl-Daniel Hailfinger wrote:
(The problem is that the Cheetah driver library has internally conflicting licenses, some of which suggest linking GPL code against it is not allowed. I (or maybe someone with more leverage) will try to address this with TotalPhase.)
If you never ship a binary then there's no problem. I don't have any issues against Cheetah support having to be enabled via a compile switch and a recompile by the user. The user has to go download and install the Cheetah libraries anyway so there's always a manual step.
If such time as someone with a commercial interest wants to distribute a flashrom binary then they can work with TotalPhase.
Unfortunately, the Cheetah requires a hardware modification to be useful as a 3.3V programmer [1] so unless TotalPhase re-spins the hardware I would not recommend it.
Of course this is probably not going to be the last time this issue comes up if you start trying to add support for commercial programmers so dealing with it now may be useful.
[1] The cheetah has inputs/outputs that are 3.3V safe but the target power is 5V only. 3.6V is available on the hardware board and you can modify it such that the target output uses that rather than 5V. For OLPC our SPI part is ok with 3.6V but other parts might not be. A small regulator would be necessary for those parts.
I've fed my comments back to TotalPhase but from the response I don't get the feeling it will change anytime soon.