Re: Another copyright issue

[Bart Veer <bartv at ecoscentric dot com>]

>>>>> "Gary" == Gary Thomas <gary at mlbassoc dot com> writes:

    Gary> As part of one of the ports I've recently done, I had to
    Gary> add a couple of files which require special consideration.
    Gary> They are binary data, and only applicable to a particular
    Gary> device (nonetheless required to build RedBoot on the device
    Gary> since it needs them to initialize the hardware).

    Gary> The producer of the files (the hardware manufacturer) has
    Gary> allowed their use, but they want their copyright on them.
    Gary> I have amended this to look like this:

    Gary> //
    Gary> // Copyright (c) 2003 Intrinsyc Europe Ltd. All rights reserved.
    Gary> //
    Gary> // Redistribution and use in source or binary format is allowed
    Gary> // provided:
    Gary> //   * This notice must be preserved
    Gary> //   * The binary data which this file represents may only be 
    Gary> //     used on a NMI uPCI + uE250 based hardware platform.
    Gary> //

    Gary> which I believe preserves their use in the spirit of open source.

    Gary> Does anyone have a problem with this?

I think we do have to be careful about this sort of thing. We don't
want to get into a situation where people contribute HAL packages
which are just prebuilt binaries, encoded in a big C array or
similar. That sort of thing makes it impossible to customize the HAL
for specific application requirements. The GPL uses the phrase
"the preferred form of the work for making modifications to it", and I
think that is a good standard to work to.

Now, there are certainly cases where you need to feed magic numbers to
hardware or it won't work. I don't have a problem with that, within
reason. In this case uE250_pci_bitstream.h is 389K and
uE250_plx_bitstream.h is 130K. That seems like an awful lot of magic,
more than the rest of the platform HAL. I would certainly like to
understand why the platform needs such a large amount of magic.

Bart