Re: [net-next RFC 6/7] i40evf: init code and hardware support

From: John Ronciak <redacted>
Date: Tue, 27 Aug 2013 11:39:03 -0700

quoted

I wonder why this is thought to be necessary.  I've never heard of
copyright assignment conditions being accepted in the Linux kernel.

quoted

Some Linux drivers are dual-licenced under a permissive licence and GPL,
and all contributions to them presumably also have to be dual-licenced.
It seems like that would allow you to retain the ability to reuse the
core hardware code on other operating systems and under proprietary
licences, even with copyrightable contributions from others.

The problem here is that it's a legal issue.  The Intel lawyers (and I've
heard form other companies on this as well) say that just because we
release code under a dual license does not mean that any changes (patches)
that come back are also under a dual license.  That cannot be assumed.  So
all changes would require us to ask that the patches in question are being
supplied under the same dual license.  This can get unmanageable fairly
quickly.  There is also long term tracking of those requests/responses.  So
using a dual license isn't the same thing unfortunately.

I think it's pretty anti-social to not accept changes made outside of
your group.

I don't want Intel ethernet drivers to go the way of ACPI where nobody
outside of you guys can make changes to the code.

I guarentee I will want to make changes to your drivers if an interface
is changed and I have to touch your code to keep the tree building when
a function signature changes.

To say that I am upset about this would be an understatement, it blocks
normal smooth development of networking infrastructure.