Hi Matthias,
On 02/13/15 11:49, Matthias Waehlisch wrote:
the core technical argument that you gave is: Your approach simplifies
compliance check. Simplification is nice but does not introduce
additional new functions in principle. From this perspective I don't see
how this approach allows us to do things that we have not been able to
do before (except we can do it 'easier'). Would you agree on this?
Not sure what you mean.
This is not a technical tool for anything. Complying to LGPL is *easy*,
and this makes it even easier.
Part of the license discussion was the question how developers can
develop proprietary (closed source) applications / products using LGPLed
RIOT.
LGPL puts some restrictions on doing that, it is a copyleft license.
Those restrictions require the vendor of such an application to provide
a way to relink the proprietary code with a newer version of the used
library (RIOT in this case).
So I created a make target which packs together everything needed to
comply to that part of the license.
Anyone using RIOT for building proprietary application now has an easy
method of providing the files needed for that part of LGPL compliancy,
"the files" meaning compiled object files. Those that would have been
shipped as part of a firmware file anyways. They don't expose more code
than a full compiled binary, it's the same.
Compared to other systems, any proprietary binary using an LGPLed
library (e.g., the GNU libc used on all major Linux distributions)
implicitly ships compiled object files and allows relinking.
As RIOT uses static linking, the proprietary object files have to be
saved before completing the static link in order to enable replacing the
LGPLed part later. This is basically all this PR tries to make supertrivial.
IMHO this does make developing proprietary code using LPGLed RIOT
comparable to writing any proprietary application for other systems like
Linux, MacOS, Windows, ... with slight differences only because of the
nature of embedded systems.
Kaspar
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