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Re: Are copyright assignments detrimental to eCos?
On Thursday 03 April 2008, Jiri Gaisler wrote:
> Markus Schaber wrote:
> > Additionally, our company has the policy that any substantial
> > contribution must be copy-lefted, so no-one else can make closed-source
> > derivates.
> >
> > Copyright assignment creates a single point of failure against
> > closed-source derivates, weakening the copyleft.
>
> I completely agree with Markus. We are hesitant to contribute our
> leon2/3 port and drivers because we do not want to have closed-source
> distributions (e.g. eCos Pro) using our code without contributing
> back fixes or improvements. The ideal solution would be to license
So GPL or LGPL would be ok for you ?
> the eCos code in LGPL. This would allow mixing proprietary applications
> with the kernel, while force any improvements or bug fixes to be
> published.
Well, and it would enforce that company ship their firmware as object files or
relinkable static libraries, so that this together with the LGPL part (eCos
then) could be relinked to a working firmware image.
I think that's not a very practical solution.
Alex
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