On Wed, Jun 24, 2009 at 12:56 PM, Detlev Zundeldzu@denx.de wrote:
Hi Jon,
There is an enormous practical consideration stopping the licensing change. u-boot has not required copyright assignment. This means that every single person that has contributed code to u-boot needs to give their permission for the change.
This is not correct. People who wrote code under "GPLv2 or later" licenses would not need to be queried. The project could use the sources under a later version.
There is a mix of GPLv2 or later and GPLv2 code. You will have to sort which license applies. Let's hope nobody modified a GPL v2 header in any file to say "GPL v2 or later". That would open a giant can of worms.
This is a giant administrative nightmare. The effort for doing this exceeds the effort require to write a new boot loader. Require copyright assignment on the new boot loader and then the license can be easily changed.