On Mon, Mar 10, 2008 at 07:14:06PM +0530, Aditya Vaidya wrote: > > Andrew Lunn wrote: >>> So the copyright assignment would only come into the picture for new >>> code. >> >> Correct. You could assign your modification, which you have copyright >> to, but without the rest of the code they are probably useless. >> > Agreed. So how would that part of the code need to be licensed to allow > public use. The modified code is all in the same file as the eCos code, > so does it automatically come under the eCos license? Is no assignment > necessary for the mod GPL?
I think you don't understand what an assignment is and why we do it. An assignment gives the ownership of the code to somebody else. For eCos this is the FSF. By giving the code to the FSF we gain some legal protection. If company X claims to own some code in eCos it could start ask for royalties, licensing deals etc. The FSF won't do this, so code assigned to the FSF makes it safe for others to use knowing they will never have to pay a license fee etc. To make the code publically available does not need an assignment. To make your code available to the public all you need to do is license your code such that the public can use it. eCos uses a mod GPL license. The MIT or the BSD license is used by other people. You could just make a public statement your code is released to the public domain. If the mod GPL is O.K. for you, you don't need to do anything since that license header is already there. I guess you will also be adding a GPL header to cover the GPL code. So if you want your modifications to be covered by GPL, then again you don't need to do anything. Andrew -- Before posting, please read the FAQ: http://ecos.sourceware.org/fom/ecos and search the list archive: http://ecos.sourceware.org/ml/ecos-discuss
