Re: [OpenBIOS] Licensing of the code.

[David Woodhouse]

[e-mail] said:
> Haven't looked at BSD fully, but I understand it to be more along the
> lines of a PD (free for all) type licence. For this type of project I
> would not want to do work that Award could come by and just take it
> for their own.

I believe that a BSD license would allow them to do that - so we can't use BSD 
either.
> I think a middle ground might be a licease that makes normal usage GPL
> like but allows the OpenBIOS group (I guess that's what we are) to
> sublicease it to  companies for the purpose listed above. (I think the
> XFree86 project did something like this)

If we're going with the modular approach, with the final link being done at 
the last moment before the flash is blown, I believe that we could use the 
LGPL for this. I've just read through it again, and it seems to be precisely 
what we're after.

We can declare all the OpenBIOS modules to be library routines, Then the
binary-only modules provided by manufacturers are "work that uses the Library",
and the only real restriction on them is that they have to allow for linking
with newer versions of our generic modules. How does that sound?

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David Woodhouse, Robinson College, CB3 9AN, England.   ([phone]
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Licensing of the code.

[Dave Cinege]

David Woodhouse wrote:
> > I think a middle ground might be a licease that makes normal usage GPL
> > like but allows the OpenBIOS group (I guess that's what we are) to
> > sublicease it to  companies for the purpose listed above. (I think the
> > XFree86 project did something like this)
>
> If we're going with the modular approach, with the final link being done at
> the last moment before the flash is blown, I believe that we could use the
> LGPL for this. I've just read through it again, and it seems to be precisely
> what we're after.
>
> We can declare all the OpenBIOS modules to be library routines, Then the
> binary-only modules provided by manufacturers are "work that uses the Library",
> and the only real restriction on them is that they have to allow for linking
> with newer versions of our generic modules. How does that sound?

The problem comes in if they have to directly modify any of our libraries. Since this is so low-level it may be impossible to work around them in some situations.

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