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

Wolfgang Denk wd at denx.de
Mon Jul 6 22:28:35 CEST 2009


Dear Garrett,

In message <364299f40907061303q5d253301u7f7fbc6be09e8937 at mail.gmail.com> you wrote:
>
> > 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 :).

No sources that are linked with the Linux kernel can be "proprietary"
in any way - at least not legally. They are  covered  by  GPLv2,  and
restrictions of the rights granted by the GPL are not possible.

> 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.

Actually this is  a  serious  misconception.  In  all  my  experience
pushing  stuff  into  mainline as soon as possible is a much stronger
push for market share and innovations.

> 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

Sorry, I don't understand what you mean here.

Why would using Free Software (which is a pretty much different thing
compared to Open Source Software) lead to loss in market share and
failure to succeed? do you have any specific examples for this? On
contrary, there are tons of examples that prove quite the opposite.

Best regards,

Wolfgang Denk

-- 
DENX Software Engineering GmbH,     MD: Wolfgang Denk & Detlev Zundel
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Phone: (+49)-8142-66989-10 Fax: (+49)-8142-66989-80 Email: wd at denx.de
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Managers know it must be good because the programmers hate it so much.


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