[U-Boot-Users] [PATCH/review] Blackfin: add support for BF538/BF539

Mike Frysinger vapier at gentoo.org
Mon Jun 2 01:03:41 CEST 2008


On Sunday 01 June 2008, Wolfgang Denk wrote:
> In message <200806011718.32290.vapier at gentoo.org> you wrote:
> > > What is the licensing of this file, and who is the Copyright holder?
> >
> > it's all ADI written and owned.  we dont particularly care about the
> > license,
>
> Ummm... Mike, you are a well-know contributor to Free Software. Such a
> statement from someone like you is kind of a shock to me.

the code in question is autogenerated.  people sniping it is no sweat off our 
back.  in general, my willingness to freely give all my code away doesnt mean 
i subscribe to the FSF mentality.

> > but i guess i can tag it GPL-2.
>
> Your guess is not good enough. We need to know for sure. And if it's
> owned by ADI *you* cannot do that.

i most certainly can.  seeing as how i'm an ADI employee and they've given me 
carte blanche for managing this code and seeing as how i'm the one who 
actually wrote all of it in the first place ...

> > > I do not think that we should allow such code in U-Boot.
> >
> > it is the designed programming style for all low level Blackfin systems. 
> > it is unified across Linux, U-Boot, bare metal code, and the official ADI
> > propriety compiler.  i thought your point was to keep U-Boot and Linux
> > the same at the API level so code sharing is very easy between it ?
>
> Yes, that's what we normally do.
>
> However here I'm really uncertain. Actually I am deeply disappointed
> that such code made it into the Linux kernel. This should have never
> happened.

there was already a debate on lkml on the topic about obvious pros/cons, but 
the code that's here is the result.  we take the stance of putting more logic 
into the headers/arch code so that end developers (like drivers) get a much 
easier time.  after all, the core stuff (like this) rarely changes whereas 
end/drivers constantly churn.  we've already seen substantially easier to 
manage drivers as a result in the kernel.
-mike
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