Re: [ECOS] Are copyright assignments detrimental to eCos?

[Andrew Lunn <andrew@lunn.ch>]

On Fri, Apr 04, 2008 at 05:35:47AM -0400, Chris Zimman wrote:
> > Does this mean that if we contribute some files to eCos under
> > this license and they end up in eCos Pro, any modifications to
> > them made by eCosCentric would have to be published and could be
> > merged back to the open version of eCos. The last sentence seems
> > to indicate this, I just want be sure.
> 
> If eCosCentric owns the copyright, they can change the license at any time.  
> If you make a contribution under GPL, I believe they still require an
> assignment 
> statement if it's not a standalone piece of code (please correct me if I'm
> wrong here).
> 
> > I have looked at the files in eCos Pro, and majority of it has
> > the GPL license with the linking exception. Is there anything that
> > would prevent me from merging updated files from eCos Pro back
> > to the open CVS version?
> 
> OK, this is an interesting issue, which I've thought about a lot recently.
> 
> So in the case of the tree that I have with ARM EABI support, it was derived
> from an eCosPro tree.

You could contribute it back if you wanted to, but you would have to
rebase the patch to the open anoncvs tree, not eCosCentric's tree. But
in some respects it does not necessarily help you. You want the
patches in the next tree you get from eCosCentric as part of your
support contract and there is no guarantee eCosCentric will pull the
changes from the open anoncvs tree into there eCosPro tree. So you end
up contributing it to both to get the most advantage out of it.

        Andrew


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