[U-Boot] U-book and GPLv3?

Wolfgang Denk wd at denx.de
Mon Jul 6 16:40:38 CEST 2009


Dear Jon,

In message <9e4733910907060541i6d59561asaa406522ae6558a2 at mail.gmail.com> you wrote:
>
> If u-boot goes GPLv3 it will simply cause the people that need secure
> boot to switch boot loaders. That will result in a loss of u-boot
> developers. It is also a lot of pointless administrative work changing
> licenses and rewriting code. Even worse, you'll could cause a u-boot
> fork at the point of the license change since the code in front of the
> change will still be licensed GPLv2 and it can't be retracted.

There is of course a certain probability that U-Boot might fork.
That's OK - it's Free Software, and it's a community project.

And I don't share your pessimistic point of view. I've  been  through
the  same  thing  before  when it came to using GNU/Linux in embedded
systems ten years ago. Now look where we are today...

And I don't expect that we will have a GPLV3 release of U-Boot in the
next few days or weeks :-)  This is a process...

> Why do you want to take on a bunch of pointless administrative work
> that is going to result in losing developers? That time could be spent
> productively writing code.

I already explained this in my posting. No need to repeat it.

Best regards,

Wolfgang Denk

-- 
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