FAT has a non-BSD license and UEFI Forum found a way to accomodate that one vendor's legal/licensing issues, and found a separate way for that to be distributed under Tiano umbrella.
All OS vendors don't hate GPL. Some Linux platforms have non-BSD tools in use today. What about a Tiano way to distribute [L]GPL code, safely separate from main BSD branch, like FAT driver is dealt with, so GPL-friendly OSVs/ISVs/OEMs -- everyone but Microsoft? :-) -- can safely use GPL code? Perhaps other non-BSD, OSI-approved FOSS licensed, and no others? Users of this code will also have to face their main hurdle, getting Microsoft to bless their EFI code, and their current restrictions already hinder any GPL code, which gets worse with each Windows release. There are about 168 UEFI projects on Github today. A few dozen would be useful to have under Tiano umbrella, current BSD-only licensing issues would prevent that. A GPL-friendly Tiano subproject would be useful to gather some code from rEFInd, VirtualBox, and various other Github projects into one place. Ignoring non-BSD licensed code will continue to spread UEFI projects in non-Tiano umbrellas and not fix the problem. On 06/10/2015 06:59 PM, El-Haj-Mahmoud, Samer wrote: > I agree that the license is an issue. Having GPL or LGPL code in EDK2 risks implementations that use this code. Even if an implementation choses not to carry this specific driver in binary format, just having the GPL source in the same tree is a risk. What if developers copy fragments of code from the GPL licensed driver and use in another module in the tree that is BSD licensed. Developeers may not pay attention to the license and its implications since EDK2 so far has used only BSD or BSD-like license. > > -----Original Message----- > From: Tian, Feng [[email protected]] > Received: Wednesday, 10 Jun 2015, 9:52PM > To: [email protected] [[email protected]] > Subject: Re: [edk2] [PATCH 0/4] Add an implementation of EFI_SMART_CARD_READER_PROTOCOL > > Ludovic, > > The license issue is the biggest concern. EDKII project is BSD license, but your proposed patch 1 is using LGPL license which may corrupt EDKII project. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ _______________________________________________ edk2-devel mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/edk2-devel
