[coreboot] RFC: draft policy for accepting blob contributions to 3rdparty/blobs

[Marc Jones]

Hi all,

Thanks for the comments. The conference discussion was very helpful. We'll
work on this  when I land in Denver and vet it posted asap. This should
make it clear to vendors and easier on the community to review.

Thanks Patrick, Stefan, Carl-Daniel, and everyone else at the conference
for the feedback.

Regards,
Marc

On Sun, Oct 11, 2015, 8:28 PM Alex G. <mr.nuke.me at gmail.com> wrote:

> Hi all,
>
> I like that we're talking about a policy, but I really feel the policy,
> as written right now, is specific to ISA blobs, and some of the points
> do not map very well to non-ISA blobs. I've made some inline comments om
> that.
>
> A point about ISA blobs and their licensing, is that whatever legalese
> they come with should not have restrictive clauses. E.g:
>     - no-reverse-engineering/decompilation clause(s)
>     - no-modification clause(s)
>     - only-use-on-<vendorname>-hardware clause(s)
> Abstracting the lack of source code, any clause which is incompatible
> with the freedoms afforded by the GPL should be rejected. I realize this
> sets a high bar, but I think protecting our contributors who do exactly
> the things I've exemplified should take priority.
>
> Alex
>
> On 10/11/2015 08:35 AM, Patrick Georgi wrote:
> > Hi all,
> >
> > on the coreboot conference, we discussed a draft of a policy for
> > inclusion of binaries into the 3rdparty/blobs repository.
> >
> > If binaries are required, we want them redistributable in
> > 3rdparty/blobs to make users' lives easier, and make it possible to
> > deal with them as good as it is possible with binaries.
> > Having clear rules should also make it easier for the developers at
> > vendors who try to maintain these binaries - no more back-and-forth on
> > gerrit that some more documentation is necessary and so on.
> > Other rules are simply necessary (eg. a license allowing
> > redistribution) for practical reasons.
> >
> > This doesn't mean we encourage the use of binaries, and to use them,
> > because they still need to be integrated through code in the coreboot
> > repository.
> >
> > The current draft can be found at
> >
> https://docs.google.com/document/d/1wMdDUAZR2Z9V7hcs3IhIOqw6sYQxb3vPEmbITTCrOwU/edit
> ,
> > and is open for comments.
> >
> > The idea is to instate this policy (or something like this) once we
> > found agreement. We can still revise the policy over time.
> >
> >
> > Patrick
> >
>
> --
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> http://www.coreboot.org/mailman/listinfo/coreboot
>
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