[U-Boot] [PATCH 2/3] usb/gadget: add the fastboot gadget

[Macpaul Lin]

Hi Wolfgang and Mike,

> > missing comment block with license/copyright/etc...
> > -mike
> >
[strip]
> Are you 100% sure this is a GPLv2+ compatible license??? I don't think
> so...
[strip]
>
> For U-Boot, we need GPLv2+.  Please see bullet # 3 at
> http://www.denx.de/wiki/view/U Boot/Patches#Attributing_Code_Copyrights_Sign
> and note # 1 at http://www.denx.de/wiki/view/U-Boot/Patches#Notes
>
> Best regards,
>
> Wolfgang Denk

I have encountered some requests of porting Google's Fastboot protocol
to u-boot from customers.
As your comment about supporting fastboot in uboot in
http://lists.linaro.org/pipermail/linaro-dev/2011-April/004136.html
I think the problem of supporting fastboot in uboot might not only be
the license problem.

For clarifying the license issue, I think we may present some history
as follows.

The original BSD license (4-clause license) was indeed incompatible with GPLv2.
However, this conflict has finally be resolved in "The new BSD
license" (2-clause license). After revising, the 2-clause BSD license
is almost exactly the same as MIT X license, which is also compatible
with GPLv2.
In detail, please check about the the page about the 3rd advertisement clause.
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/bsd.html
And the content of the 4th clause which has been removed was "Neither
the name of the University nor the names of its contributors may be
used to endorse or promote products derived from this software without
specific prior written permission."

The license of Google's fastboot is exactly 2-clause BSD license.
http://www.opensource.org/licenses/bsd-license.php

I think the well-known event of merging
BSD/GPL code in QEMU could be a reference.
The well-known Open Source Licensing and Patent consultant of Redhat
-- Richard Fontana has also helped on this problem.
In order to merge SLiRP into QEMU, Richard has written e-mail to the
author of SLiRP, which is "Danny Gasparovski" and the maintainer
"Kelly Price" to get the agreement of removing the incompatible
clauses.
And after the revising of license, they've successfully merged SLiRP.
http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/qemu-devel/2009-01/msg01765.html

Since the license of fastboot.c doesn't have the problem above, I
think there is no compatible problem for merging "Google's fastboot".


-- 
Best regards,
Macpaul Lin