Hi Tom,
On Tue, Jul 23, 2013 at 01:25:50PM -0400, Tom Schouten wrote:
So the
'simple' approach would be to not merge them yet, but have a CCID
+ phone-side firmware based on at91lib/at91work, but keep the old
openpcd derived firmware for tracing. Switching the modes would then
require a firmware download.
How should the licensing work when taking snippets from the at91lib
and the SIMtrace/openpcd GPL code? The at91lib code requires the
Atmel copyright notice to be retained in derived work. Is that
compatible with licensing the whole firmware under the GPL?
Indicating the author of a work is a non-transferrable 'moral right'
under EU (and possibly other jurisdictions) copyright anyway, so no
matter what the GPL might say, an author can always require his name
to be associated with the work.
Also, the Atmel copyright notice + disclaimer is only requried in source
code distributions, so it is not like the (GPL-incompatible) old BSD
license with advertisement clause. In fact, to the contrary, Atmel
states "Atmel's name may not be used to endorse or promote products
derived from this software without specific prior written permission"
So while I'm not the FSF and can make 'official' license
interpretations, I wouldn't expect any problem here.
If you'd like to get an official opinion by the FSF, feel free to submit
the at91lib license header to their legal team. But please keep in
mind, that even the FSF can only give an opinion and its interpretation
(while being influential and respected) doesn't interfere with the
freedom of a court deciding based on its understanding of law.
Regards,
Harald
--
- Harald Welte <laforge(a)gnumonks.org>
http://laforge.gnumonks.org/
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