Alternative License for Parts of MTD?

[Atlant Schmidt]

Artem, et al.:

> Irrespectively of what random people in the mailing list think, this is
> a question to layers. And I guess you'd need to have permission of all
> copyright holders, which I guess all people who contributed, and this is
> practically impossible to do. But I do not know for sure whether this is
> correct or not :-)

  Yes, the current opinion seems to be that to change
  the licensing terms for a given module from restrictive
  terms (such as (L)GPL) to less-restrictive terms, one
  needs the assent of anyone who ever contributed to that
  module. That's why conversion to a more-restrictive
  license such as (l)GPL tends to be a "sticky" (one-way)
  conversion.

  The best alternative is to re-write the functionality
  in a "clean room" environment and then release it
  under your choice of license terms. One can certainly
  emulate the design of the existing code without
  violating any copyright. Patents are, of course,
  another (and separate) issue; the existing design
  may incorporate patented methods which one can't
  necessarily emulate freely.

                            Atlant
                        (IANAL, etc.)

-----Original Message-----
From: linux-mtd-bounces at lists.infradead.org [mailto:linux-mtd-bounces at lists.infradead.org] On Behalf Of Artem Bityutskiy
Sent: Friday, April 13, 2012 11:29
To: Sebastian Huber
Cc: Linux MTD
Subject: Re: Alternative License for Parts of MTD?

On Fri, 2012-04-13 at 16:15 +0200, Sebastian Huber wrote:
> Hello,
>
> I work with the real-time operating system RTEMS (http://www.rtems.com).  The
> license of this system is GPL with an exception that allows static linking
> without restrictions:
>
> http://www.rtems.com/license/LICENSE
>
> This is very similar to the eCos license:
>
> http://ecos.sourceware.org/license-overview.html
>
> RTEMS has currently no framework for flash devices.  It would be nice if we can
> use parts of the MTD system, e.g. the header files and device independent
> support routines like "drivers/mtd/nand/nand_base.c".  Is it possible to
> release parts of the MTD code under the RTEMS or eCos license, or would you
> categorically refuse this?

Irrespectively of what random people in the mailing list think, this is
a question to layers. And I guess you'd need to have permission of all
copyright holders, which I guess all people who contributed, and this is
practically impossible to do. But I do not know for sure whether this is
correct or not :-)

--
Best Regards,
Artem Bityutskiy

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