Re: Broken A20 gate handling (about GPL)

["Yoshinori K. Okuji" <okuji@enbug.org>]

Hello Ludovic,

On Friday 01 July 2005 14:43, Ludovic Drolez wrote:
> Marco Gerards wrote:
> > I think it is not possible for us to use syslinux/isolinux code I
> > think.  For GRUB the copyrights need to be assigned to the FSF before
> > a patch can be applied.
>
> !?!?!?

I am afraid that Marco misunderstood this.

We prefer assigning copyright to the FSF, but this does not mean that we may 
not use others' code. The important thing is that we must carefully treat who 
owns which code, so we must separate code into different files when we reuse 
code written for other projects.

This is only _my preference_, but I would like to keep critical parts of GRUB 
owned solely by the FSF. So, for example, I do not care about the copyright 
of a filesystem very much, but I do care about the copyright of bootstrap 
code.

In the case of the A20, I'm not sure how I want to implement it. It is not 
that bad to use syslinux code, because we have our own alternative. However, 
this code is very critical, and I prefer writing our own code. After all, my 
opinion looks like the same as Marco. :p

> There's no such requirement in the GNU GPL ! (and syslinux is GPLed)
> 
> If collaborative work is impossible with grub, then grub is not licensed
> under the GPL.

This is not related to GPL. GPL is just a license. It does not define how a 
project should be managed.

Okuji