[U-Boot] [PATCH] drivers/ddr/fsl: Dual-license DDR driver

[Marek Vasut]

On 02/13/2018 07:32 PM, York Sun wrote:
> On 02/13/2018 09:38 AM, Marek Vasut wrote:
>> On 02/13/2018 05:30 PM, York Sun wrote:
>>> On 02/13/2018 04:49 AM, Wolfgang Denk wrote:
>>>> Dear York,
>>>>
>>>> In message <VI1PR04MB20785EF7D2578E39C048EE219AF70 at VI1PR04MB2078.eurprd04.prod.outlook.com> you wrote:
>>>>>
>>>>> Nobody said anything. Some addresses bounced. And most changes made out
>>>>> people outside Freescale/NXP are minor changes, except twice the files
>>>>> were moved during U-Boot structure change. What options do I have?
>>>>
>>>> Ask all people who contributed to that code for their explicit
>>>> permission.  Legally it is a huge difference between actively
>>>> confirming approval and not reacting at all.
>>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> All,
>>>
>>> If you haven't responded, please give your explicit approval to change
>>> Freescale DDR driver to dual-license so it can be re-used by other
>>> project(s) with BSD license. Here is the list I compiled from the git
>>> history. All commits made by Freescale/NXP employees are removed from
>>> this list.
>>
>> [...]
>>
>>> cd84b1f - Marek Vasut, marek.vasut at gmail.com, 6 years ago : GCC4.6:
>>> Squash warnings in ddr[123]_dimm_params.c
>>
>> I do NOT approve.
>>
>> My previous experience with dual-licensed code was with wpa-supplicant.
>> A certain company manufacturing handhelds took it, modified it and was
>> selling the binary. While we were porting Linux onto the device, we
>> asked for the modifications to get the WiFi operational in the Linux port.
>>
>> What we got from this company was "it's BSD licensed, go away". Were the
>> code GPL, they would be legally obliged to provide the changes, but it
>> was BSD, so the company in question could make profit and the community
>> lost.
>>
>> This was a prime example of how BSD license is harmful to software
>> freedom and how the community lost because of the BSD license. I do not
>> want to see this happening ever again and I like GPL for that very much.
>>
> 
> Marek,
> 
> Please allow me to try to convince you.
> Git log shows you have one commit cd84b1f which fixed the compiling
> warning for GCC 4.6 on three debug messages. I appreciate your fix.
> 
> This driver is for Freescale/NXP DDR controllers, specifically designed
> on Freescale/NXP SoCs. We spent tremendous effort to make it robust.
> This driver is useful to initialize DDR for the platforms. While we are
> moving the platform initialization to ATF (Arm Trusted Firmware), or
> other pre-bootloader code (such as NXP's implementation of ATF), this
> driver can be reused to provide the same level of hardware support. As
> you may know, ATF uses BSD-3 license (some files have GPL/BSD dual
> licnese). Your approval will make our life easier without having to
> rewrite the entire driver from scratch.

So what is in it for me ?

If the code remains GPL, I can ask NXP for changes to the driver if I
have the binary which contains this code.

If the code gets re-licensed to dual GPL/BSD, I assume in certain cases,
NXP will choose BSD and will not be obliged to provide the changes.

I don't see any benefit for me, any way I look at it, I'm either even or
loose .

Why can't you use the code under the current (GPL) license anyway ?

-- 
Best regards,
Marek Vasut