On Fri, Sep 23, 2011 at 4:56 PM, Graeme Russ graeme.russ@gmail.com wrote:
Hi Simon,
On 24/09/11 03:38, Simon Glass wrote:
From: Sonny Rao sonnyrao@chromium.org
From: Sonny Rao sonnyrao@chromium.org
These functions are useful in U-Boot because they allow a graceful failure rather than an unpredictable stack overflow when printf() buffers are exceeded.
Mostly copied from the Linux kernel. I copied vscnprintf and scnprintf so we can change printf and vprintf to use the safe implementation but still return the correct values.
Have you checked for license compatibility? U-Boot is GPLv2+ and (most) of Linux is GPLv2 - You may not be legally permitted to do this
According to the FSF site, GPLv2 is compatible with GPLv3, see: http://www.gnu.org/licenses/quick-guide-gplv3.html
So it's fine to distribute them together.
In reality though, this code in U-boot was already copied from the same file in an older version of the kernel. The license (GPLv2 only) hasn't changed on that file, so U-boot is already distributing what is GPLv2 only code alongside GPLv2+ code -- which as I mentioned above is fine.
The code here is derived from a later version of that same file, so I don't believe integrating this patch into U-boot actually changes anything with respect to licensing of this code.
Sonny