[U-Boot] u-boot standalone application license question

William Zhang william.zhang at broadcom.com
Thu Aug 1 23:12:20 UTC 2019


Hi,

We are looking at the standalone application support in u-boot and we feel
it will be a good fit for our DDR initialization code that includes a
library that we have no right to distribute in source.   But we have some
questions in regards to the GPL license exception here:

https://gitlab.denx.de/u-boot/u-boot/blob/master/Licenses/Exceptions

GPL License Exception:

Even though U-Boot in general is covered by the GPL-2.0/GPL-2.0+,
this does *not* cover the so-called "standalone" applications that
use U-Boot services by means of the jump table provided by U-Boot
exactly for this purpose - this is merely considered normal use of
U-Boot, and does *not* fall under the heading of "derived work".

  The header files "include/image.h" and "arch/*/include/asm/u-boot.h"
define interfaces to U-Boot.  Including these (unmodified) header
files in another file is considered normal use of U-Boot, and does
*not* fall under the heading of "derived work".
-- Wolfgang Denk

Looking at the standalone examples/hello_world.c,  it now includes
common.h(gpl license header) and exports.h(no license header).  Same to
the stub.c(with compiler.h in addition) which is required to build
standalone app.   Would that still consider OK and be exempted from GPL
license if we follow this example and include both common.h, exports.h and
stub.c in our standalone code?

Thanks in advance for any feedbacks and comments!

Regards,
William


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