[U-Boot] Need assistance with increasing command line size on Cavium

[Garrett Cooper]

On Mon, Jul 6, 2009 at 12:30 PM, Wolfgang Denk<wd at denx.de> wrote:
> Dear Garrett Cooper,
>
> In message <364299f40907061215m2f239b33tbf0914e066a9f4e9 at mail.gmail.com> you wrote:
>>
>> > Yes, he should. This should be covered by GPLv2.
>>
>> Yeah, Cavium did some potentially interesting things by tokenizing the
>> arguments and passing it to the kernel arguments parser in their
>> platform dependent routines. Unfortunately this isn't opensource
>> because even though it's GPLv2, as they only provide their kernel
>> sources and SDK to customers with Cavium accounts (which require
>> purchasing the hardware).
>
> But any of these Cavium users has the full rights granted by the GPL,
> whih includes for example to put the code or patches on a FTP server
> or to post them here on the mailing list.

Yes, but the license used in the kernel and glibc (the last time I
checked, and I'm not a lawyer), have differences from the vanilla
?L?GPL licenses because of the way the pieces of software are defined
and things interlink with one another -- otherwise you'd have to
expose a lot of sources to the general community that are proprietary.
Yet, it all depends on how things interlock too and where the
modifications are made :).

> Maybe anybody is listening and willing to invest this little effort
> for the benefit of all?
>
>> I'm going to pursue obtaining the patch via our Cavium PoC and see if
>> I can get it put into the U-boot source tree.
>
> Thanks in advance.

Np. I know this junk sucks because of the way that things are written
and designed, but I can also see how keeping things proprietary to
keep market share and innovations is important.

Since we're already straying a bit OT...

I just think that some businesses fail to compromise at some decent
middle ground that benefits both the community and the corporation --
that's what both group should seek for the betterment of both groups,
because absolute proprietary secrets just leads to bitrot and security
flaws, whereas total exposure leads to potential loss in market share
and failure to succeed (take OSS for instance), unless one has a good
product and marketing strategy that isn't based purely in software,
but a combination of proprietary ASICs and software (take Apple for
example and how they've opensourced Darwin).

Cheers,
-Garrett