Re: [LinuxBIOS] [IMPORT] GIGABYTE GA-2761GXDK

[Uwe Hermann]

Hi,

first of all -- thanks a lot for your code contribution!
This is really great!

On Thu, Oct 04, 2007 at 10:28:46AM +0800, Morgan Tsai wrote:
> Can you help me how to write the correct License declaration?
> It's the first time for me to publish our code under the GPL.
> Could you show a example here?

For LinuxBIOS we use the same common header everywhere:

http://linuxbios.org/index.php/Development_Guidelines#Common_License_Header

So in your case something like this:

/*
 * This file is part of the LinuxBIOS project.
 *
 * Copyright (C) 2007 Silicon Integrated Systems Corp. (SiS)
 * (Written by Morgan Tsai  for SiS)
 *
 * This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify
 * it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
 * the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or
 * (at your option) any later version.
 *
 * This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
 * but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
 * MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the
 * GNU General Public License for more details.
 *
 * You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
 * along with this program; if not, write to the Free Software
 * Foundation, Inc., 51 Franklin St, Fifth Floor, Boston, MA  02110-1301 USA
 */

I assume you wrote the code (during working time) for SiS, so I guess
the copyright belongs to SiS, the license is the GPL (version 2 or
later), though. Is this correct?

Every file should have this license header, with all the copyright
owners listed. Files you wrote yourself from scratch (or very trivial
files such as chip.h) are 'Copyright (C) 2007 SiS'.

Code which is heavily based on already existing code should retain the
original copyright owner, but you add SiS as additional copyright owner
if the changes made by SiS are non-trivial. Example:

/*
 * This file is part of the LinuxBIOS project.
 *
 * Copyright (C) 2007 AMD
 * (Written by Yinghai Lu  for AMD)
 * Copyright (C) 2007 Silicon Integrated Systems Corp. (SiS)
 * (Written by Morgan Tsai  for SiS)
 *
 * This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify
 * it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
 * the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or
 * (at your option) any later version.
 *
 * This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
 * but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
 * MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the
 * GNU General Public License for more details.
 *
 * You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
 * along with this program; if not, write to the Free Software
 * Foundation, Inc., 51 Franklin St, Fifth Floor, Boston, MA  02110-1301 USA
 */

Hope that helps...

I'll review the code more thoroughly tomorrow or so and provide some
more suggestions for improvements. I hope we can commit this code
soonish, this is very good news.

Are there any existing mainstream boards which can use this code
already? Stuff you can buy in computer shops, not prototype boards?

Thanks, Uwe.