Re: [ECOS] Who's maintaining CVS

[Jonathan Larmour <jifl at eCosCentric dot com>]

Jani Monoses wrote:
>
> But please do submit it in good faith.I cannot claim ownership of that
> code because I modified the at29xxxx sources myself (I guess). This is
> what I was talking about and disliking it:because of some silly
> paperwork some would end up rewriting a patch even if it is GPLed based
> on other GPLed work which in most opensource projects is enough.

Note: eCos is not the vanilla GPL, and we do not want vanilla GPL code in 
eCos.

> It
> slows down the growth of ecos and if RH no longer cares about ecos and
> instead it only focuses on embedded linux I guess it's good for them I
> hope I am wrong though.

Actually you're right, but other people care :-).

> The same way I cannot sign such an assignment
> in good faith for lwIP because it's a port and 95% of it is not
> mine.It's BSD licensed work of Adam Dunkels.

My earlier mail mentions putting stuff in the public domain. The BSD 
licence is almost close enough to be that (but isn't, and we are extremely 
reluctant to accept a BSD licensed contribution - the inclusion of BSD 
code is there under sufferance... but I don't want to start a discussion 
on the lack of merit of the BSD licence ;)).

> What prevents RH for instance from suing somebody forusing eCos?
> User:-"But.. but.. but.. the site said it's GPL-ed...free download...
> open source" RH(grinning): "Did we sign anything?" IANAL but as the
> situation above is unrealistic and absurd the same goes for a company
> making a fool of itself by trying to sue RH for including GPL-ed code
> in eCos.

I can't remember the specifics, but I believe it has happened before. 
Employee of company writes non-trivial portion of open source software in 
"free time", but doesn't notice that company owns copyright due to 
employment contract. Software becomes successful and widely used. Company 
threatens to enforce copyright. If anyone remembers the specifics please 
e-mail me off list as I'd like to have my memory jogged :-).

Red Hat won't do anything like this because they are a business entirely 
centred on Open Source and could never have any credibility if something 
like that happened. Any other random business might though.

> Again if Gary or somebody at RH can think of a solution for licensing
> the code so that it complies with eCos OK,but I am not going to DHL a
> legal paper overseas which is probably longer than the code I
> contributed.

DHL? Normal post should be fine surely. Remember you only need to sign an 
assignment *once*[1].

Jifl
[1] I could be wrong on this in future if we change to assign to some 
organisation other than Red Hat.
--
--[ "You can complain because roses have thorns, or you ]--
--[  can rejoice because thorns have roses." -Lincoln   ]-- Opinions==mine


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