What about other grub-extras? Lua is under MIT license. Although I am not well versed in all these licensing/legal issues, isn't MIT license compatible with GPL.
gPXE/Etherboot is under GPL2. 915resolution and ntldr-img (which is grub4dos functionality - right?) are under GPL3 (COPYING files in the respective repos). Many users and packagers don't know about the existence of grub-extras, especially about lua and zfs. If there are no legal issues there is no point in keeping them in separate repos. Regards. Keshav On Thu, Dec 2, 2010 at 16:54, Robert Millan <[email protected]> wrote: > Hi, > > Following our new strategy with regard to Oracle code, we (GRUB > maintainers) have decided to grant an exception to our usual policy and > import ZFS code from grub-extras into official GRUB. > > Our usual policy is to require copyright assignment for all new code, so > that FSF can use it to defend users' freedom in court. If that's not > possible, at least a disclaimer asserting authorship (i.e. that no > copyright infringement has been committed). The purpose of this, as > always, is ensuring that GRUB is a legally safe codebase. > > The ZFS code that has been imported into GRUB derives from the > OpenSolaris version of GRUB Legacy. On one hand, this code was released > to the public under the terms of the GNU GPL. On the other, binary > releases of Solaris included this modified GRUB, and as a result > Oracle/Sun is bound by the GPL. > > We believe that these two factors give us very strong reassurance that: > > a) Oracle owns the copyright to this code > and > b) Oracle is licensing it under GPL > > and therefore it is completely safe to use this in GRUB. > > We're looking forward to this code import will foster collaboration on > ZFS support for GRUB. Our understanding is that next version of > Solaris will ship with GRUB 2, and so we expect the whole OpenSolaris > ecosystem to do this move as well. We encourage downstream distributors > to anticipate this by preparing their transition from the old, legacy > version of GRUB (0.97) which is no longer supported by GRUB developers. > > > Finally, a word about patents. Software patents are terribly harmful to > free software, and to IT in general. We believe they should be > abolished. However, until that happens, we need to take measures to > protect our users. We recognize it is practically impossible for end > users to archieve a situation where they're completely safe from patent > infringement (even if they pay so-called "patent taxes" to specific > companies). > > However, we encourage our users to make careful choices when importing > technology that is designed in an in-door development model (rather > than in the community), because it's prone to be heavily patented. > > This is the reason why, when we (the GNU project) developed the GPL, we > included certain provisions in it to ensure a patent holder can't > benefit from the freedoms we gave them and at the same time use patents > to undermine these freedoms for others. > > Thanks to this, and due to the fact that Oracle is bound to the terms > of the GNU GPL when it comes to GRUB, we believe this renders patents > covering ZFS basically harmless to GRUB users. If the patents > covering GRUB are held by Oracle, they can't use them against GRUB > users, and if they're held by other parties, the GPL provisions will > prevent Oracle from paying a tax only for themselves, so if they will > fight alongside the community instead of betraying it. > > Let this serve as yet another example on why so-called "permissive" > licenses aren't always a guarantee that the code covered by them can be > used freely. If you intend for your code to be free for all users, > always use the latest version of the GPL. > > -- > Robert Millan > > _______________________________________________ > Grub-devel mailing list > [email protected] > http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/grub-devel > _______________________________________________ Grub-devel mailing list [email protected] http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/grub-devel
