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Re: [ECOS] Re: RE : [ECOS] Licence consideratios.
- From: Jonathan Larmour <jifl at eCosCentric dot com>
- To: Andrew Lunn <andrew at lunn dot ch>
- Cc: eCos Maintainers <ecos-maintainers at ecos dot sourceware dot org>
- Date: Fri, 19 Mar 2004 01:45:02 +0000
- Subject: Re: [ECOS] Re: RE : [ECOS] Licence consideratios.
- References: <20040316145729.GB31390@lunn.ch> <000301c40b6b$b0d064b0$7407a8c0@figuier> <20040316153617.GC31390@lunn.ch> <4059BB7E.9020100@eCosCentric.com>
Jonathan Larmour wrote:
This is the license in question. http://www.rtems.com/license/LICENSE
IANAL of course, but I believe it is incompatible: "[...] linking other
files with RTEMS objects to produce an executable application, does not
by itself cause the resulting executable application to be covered
by the GNU General Public License."
This will be linked with non-RTEMS objects. Therefore the full GPL would
apply, therefore it is not acceptable, sorry. We can put it up in our
contributions section, but not include it in the main source base.
Okay, I'm being noisy here, but now on rereading/rethinking, I think I'm
wrong on the above reasoning.
However there is still an issue.... right now we allow any works based on
eCos to be distributed with the GPL exception clause. This permits people
to distribute unlinked or partially linked objects, e.g. libtarget.a etc.
with no further restrictions than if they distributed other binaries.
The RTEMS license only permits executable applications to be distributed
with the exception, so if someone distributes libtarget.a, then it becomes
fully GPL'd, and so their whole application would become GPL'd. This is an
undesirable new restriction.
So yes there is still a problem and I'll send that to ecos-discuss.
Jifl
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