Re: [ECOS] Re: RE : [ECOS] Licence consideratios.

[Jonathan Larmour <jifl@eCosCentric.com>]

Jonathan Larmour wrote:
> This is the license in question. http://www.rtems.com/license/LICENSE
> 
> IANAL of course, but I believe it is incompatible: "[...] linking other 
> files with RTEMS objects to produce an executable application, does not
> by itself cause the resulting executable application to be covered
> by the GNU General Public License."
> 
> This will be linked with non-RTEMS objects. Therefore the full GPL would 
> apply, therefore it is not acceptable, sorry. We can put it up in our 
> contributions section, but not include it in the main source base.

Okay, I'm being noisy here, but now on rereading/rethinking, I think I'm 
wrong on the above reasoning.

However there is still an issue.... right now we allow any works based on 
eCos to be distributed with the GPL exception clause. This permits people 
to distribute unlinked or partially linked objects, e.g. libtarget.a etc. 
with no further restrictions than if they distributed other binaries.

The RTEMS license only permits executable applications to be distributed 
with the exception, so if someone distributes libtarget.a, then it becomes 
fully GPL'd, and so their whole application would become GPL'd. This is an 
undesirable new restriction.

So yes there is still a problem and I'll send that to ecos-discuss.

Jifl
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