Re: National Semiconductor Corporation Open Source License

[Takashi Iwai <tiwai@suse.de>]

At Sat, 1 Mar 2003 19:26:34 +0100,
Martin Langer wrote:
> 
> 
> Hi,
> 
> the ALSA-0.5 Geode Driver (geode.c) on
> http://www.gctglobal.com/Download/alsa-geode.tar.gz 
> which still waits for a port to 0.9 has the following license, which is not
> GPL. Is it really possible to include such a license into the alsa package?
> (I see the big problem in the export laws because the kernel is under GPL
> without an export rule)

not all kernel sources are under GPL.

> I won't use this code, but I'm definitely no license expert. Or is it possible
> to use a different license for a port (IMHO it's more than a modification, but
> I don't know the definition of a lawyer in this case)
> 
> On the other hand I found another older file in the tgz called geode_BAK.c
> without a license text. Same license, no license or GPL for that file?
> 
> Or can a port use a dual license (GPL/NSC OSL)?

Dual BSD/GPL are used in many drivers.

	% grep -r 'MODULE_LICENSE("Dual BSD/GPL")' linux
	linux/fs/nls/nls_cp1250.c:MODULE_LICENSE("Dual BSD/GPL");
	linux/fs/nls/nls_cp1251.c:MODULE_LICENSE("Dual BSD/GPL");
	linux/fs/nls/nls_cp1255.c:MODULE_LICENSE("Dual BSD/GPL");
	linux/fs/nls/nls_big5.c:MODULE_LICENSE("Dual BSD/GPL");
	linux/fs/nls/nls_sjis.c:MODULE_LICENSE("Dual BSD/GPL");
	...

but, this driver code is terrible.  it's aceesing the PCI registers
directly without the linux PCI API, and use the fixed irq, etc.
we should write it from scratch based on the hardware information of
this driver.


Takashi


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