[U-Boot] U-book and GPLv3? (fwd)

Mike Frysinger
2009-06-18T15:42:52Z

On Thursday 18 June 2009 10:51:28 Wolfgang Denk wrote:
> From: Richard Stallman <rms@gnu.org>
>> Have you considered moving U-boot to "GPLv3-or-later"?
>
> I know that we have had similar discussions before (see for example
> http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.boot-loaders.u-boot/24029), but I
> would like to take the chance and re-poll what the community's
> opinion about this is.
>
> Comments welcome...

i think it's a bad idea. it'll almost certainly lead to forks as people use
it on systems where they dont want to let people boot custom builds. i.e.
customers absolutely want to lock their hardware such that only their builds
run on it. GPLv2 allows this while GPLv3 does not.

Linux has taken a realistic stance here and i think U-Boot should follow suit
(well, i dont care about the "or later" part, just that the base from denx is
GPLv2). also, it would make code sharing with Linux a nightmare since many
pieces have moved to explicitly GPLv2 -- no one is going to audit code flowing
between to make sure things can move safely.
-mike
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