Formal license ambiguity in arch/arm/boot/dts/sun?i-a*.dts

On Monday 04 August 2014, Russell King - ARM Linux wrote:

On Mon, Aug 04, 2014 at 09:25:10PM +0200, Maxime Ripard wrote:

quoted

On Sun, Aug 03, 2014 at 07:59:27PM +0200, Arnd Bergmann wrote:

quoted

I would actually prefer if we could migrate a lot of these files to BSD license,
provided the original authors agree. We want the dtb blobs to be embeddable into
boot loaders of any license.

Even though I'd be open to having my contributions to DTBs under the
BSD, is this really a thing?

I mean, for all I know, an OS/Bootloader would just parse a documented
binary file, and I don't see any derivative work there.

How does the OS/Bootloader end up with that binary file?

For the sake of argument, let's say that the BSDs want to move to DT on
ARM.  Great, they convert over to parsing our DT blobs.

They already do, at least FreeBSD.

However, they can't distribute the binary DT blobs to their users without
coming up against the problems of the GPL wrt binary distribution.

They could distribute the source files, but remember that many of those
are currently GPL licensed, so they'd probably end up having to package
them entirely separately, if they're willing to do that at all.

Or they could decide to ignore us altogether, and do their own DT stuff,
maybe partially implementing our properties, or maybe coming up with
different and/or incompatible properties - which would be bad because
we now end up with two ways to describe the same hardware in active use.

I think this is exactly what is happening on the platforms that FreeBSD
first adopted DT on.

I suspect the final option is the one they'd choose, and it's in our
interest that that doesn't happen.

Right, or at least not have it spread to other platforms.

	Arnd