[U-Boot] [EXT] Re: Cavium/Marvell Octeon Support

[Wolfgang Denk]

Dear Daniel & Aaron,

In message <7fdf93f6-412e-5fcf-da5e-17665daadb30 at gmail.com> you wrote:
>
> > Some other things we have included are a native API that allows Simple 
> > Executive applications to make calls into U-Boot for such things as 
> > environment variable access as well as access to block devices and 
> > filesystems.
>
> This is one of the parts that shouldn't be needed for basic upstream
> support. It your API is a parallel and independent implementation of the
> API that U-Boot already has for standalone applications, than I'm afraid
> this won't be accepted and should be kept in a downstream fork.

The big question here is what these are intended for.

If they are indeed thought as standalone applications, especially
containing code that shall not be disclosed unter GPL, then there is
a licensing issue - the pretty hard restrictions of the API for
standalone applications is intentional, and attempts to work around
it are license violations.

But if it's just normal GPL code that is somehow dependent on U-Boot
services, then why is it not linked against U-Boot?

Or this might be something ike dynamically loadable modules - well,
then a close look is needed because such an approach has to be
generic enough (end probably borrow much from Linux).

Best regards,

Wolfgang Denk

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