On Wednesday, November 21, 2018, Stefano Babic sbabic@denx.de wrote:
Hi Marek,
On 21/11/18 15:31, Marek Vasut wrote:
On 11/21/2018 10:20 AM, Wolfgang Denk wrote:
Dear Stefano,
Hi,
In message 96836cc1-e4bb-a2a2-05ac-056053b4c426@denx.de you wrote:
I would like to see the library under LGPL instead of GPL2, too, and I raised this issue when I started SWUpdate, but I was not very active to promote this. Tom, Wolfgang, is there chances to switch license ?
Relicensing requires permission from all who contributed to that code.
Consider mine as granted.
But someone hat to invest the efforts to analyze the code so we know who to ask, and then collect all the permissions...
A env library is very welcomed by many customers, because they could integrate it in their application if license allows it.
Agreed.
Then again, U-Boot environment structure is trivial, crc, flags, data, there is no complexity involved. There is probably some complexity in the backing store access stuff (MTD, block devs, legacy stuff), but that should either use some MTD utils libs, basic block access primitives or be given a once-over and possibly be dropped.
I think prototyping a library from scratch that's LGPL would be a few days' work and the benefit would be tremendous all over.
I confess I had the same idea - why not ignore the code in tools/env (they have also some drawbacks, see the locking mechanism in my previous e-mail) and start with a new library from scratch ? Then LGPL is not an issue anymore, it is a new development. And I already took this way for "grubenv" (I had to, grubenv is not license compatible).
But something in my head is telling me that this is not else as a fork of u-boot (ok, a partial fork, just tools/env). And if the U-Boot community decides to follow other ways for the environment, the "forked" project aka "new library" should follow. But yes, I guess it is easier, and I agree with you this is just a few days work.
Once you had this new lgpl library, would it be a big problem to backport it to the U-Boot tree? Wouldn't that also ensure future commiters accept the lgpl license when adding their new code?
Simon