On 09/22/2012 03:58 AM, Wolfgang Denk wrote:
Dear judge.packham@gmail.com,
In message 1348216335-18105-1-git-send-email-judge.packham@gmail.com you wrote:
From: Chris Packham judge.packham@gmail.com
Instead of storing the mircocode in a separate flash block simply embed the image as C code array of bytes.
What exactly is the licensing of this code?
Good point. I got the firmware out of the SDK that came with our P2041RDB. I believe the intent was that the Fman microcode is written to a reserved flash block and downloaded to the frame manager by the OS when needed. As a Freescale customer I would actually prefer to have the source released under the GPL and build everything into the u-boot image.
Would it not have to be GPL compatible to "link" it in such a way, which in turn would require the source code and the tools to build it ?
Well I took one law paper at university and quickly decided to major in computer science instead so I am entirely unqualified to comment :). That being said it probably depends on the definition of "link". No code is actually being called directly from u-boot, it's just a convenient transportation mechanism. Still there are statements in the GPL about what constitutes distributing the code, someone more qualified can tackle that.
I can understand why for u-boot this might be a gray area. Writing firmware blobs to a flash block somewhere is a solution that avoids any problems and makes my patch unsuitable/unnecessary.