Hi List, there has been some speculation about my original intents so I thought I might chime in here.
I'm all in favor of enforcing the GPL where it achieves anything for the user. In case of FTD2XX I decided to go the pragmatic way instead of the idealist's way. Why do we want to link against compatibly licensed libraries only? Because we want to ensure the user's freedom to use our software and his hardware on whatever platform he sees fit. Back then there was libftdi, which allowed FTD2XX based interfaces to be used on Linux, *BSD and so on. And we had FTD2XX which allowed the FTD2XX based interface to be used on Windows, and which offered a significant performance improvement on Linux (this has been solved? I remember reading something about it on the list...). My point of view was that we weren't restricting a user's freedom by allowing the use of FTD2XX. Instead it made the OpenOCD accessible to a much greater audience. As long as libftdi /could/ be made to do the same thing that FTD2XX does, using information publicly available, I don't see an immediate need to enforce seemingly arbitrary restrictions over our users. I wasn't aware of the possibility or need for license exceptions, and I thought (IANAL... how I hate that acronym...) that if anyone, it would take me to enforce the GPL terms. As I had no intend to enforce the GPL over someone who linked against FTD2XX I figured everything would be fine (I think I explicitly wrote that to Michael Fischer some years ago). This may not have been the wisest of decisions but that's how it is or rather was. Øyvind mentioned the idea of wrapping the JTAG API in TCP/IP. Aside from performance implications I think this would require some significant development efforts with little immediate benefits. Even worse, it would encourage other JTAG interface vendors to implement their JTAG interface layer as a binary only driver that talks to the OpenOCD via TCP/IP layer, too. Best Regards, Dominic
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