Re: A proposal - binary

From: Zachary Amsden
Date: Thu Aug 03 2006 - 14:05:59 EST


Arjan van de Ven wrote:
Hi,

you use a lot of words for saying something self contradictory. It's
very simple; based on your mail, there's no reason the VMI gateway page
can't be (also) GPL licensed (you're more than free obviously to dual,
tripple or quadruple license it). Once your gateway thing is gpl
licensed, your entire proposal is moot in the sense that there is no
issue on the license front. See: it can be very easy. Much easier than
trying to get a license exception (which is very unlikely you'll get)...


Now you can argue for hours about if such an interface is desirable or
not, but I didn't think your email was about that.

Arjan, thank you for reading my prolific manifesto. I am not arguing for the interface being desirable, and I don't think I'm being self contradictory. There was some confusion over technical details of the VMI gateway page that I wanted to make explicit. Hopefully I have fully explained those. I'm not trying to get a license exemption, I'm trying to come up with a model that current and future hardware vendors can follow when faced with the same set of circumstances.

It was not 100% clear based on conversations at OLS that open-sourcing the VMI layer met the letter and intent of the kernel license model. There were some arguments that not having the source integrated into the kernel violated the spirit of the GPL by not allowing one to distribute a fully working kernel. I wanted to show that is not true, and the situation is actually quite unique. Perhaps we can use this to encourage open sourced firmware layers, instead of trying to ban drivers which rely on firmware from the kernel.

Zach
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