Hello to all, I don't want to get involved in the 'war' that seems to have erupted over this issue. I am a user of OpenOCD rather than a developer, I regularly grab SVN head and compile it under Cygwin for Windows with FTD2XX.lib. And I will continue to do so for my private build.
It is clear that OpenOCD is GPL. It is also clear that FTD2XX.lib is not, although no license is published, the source code is also not published - it cannot be GPL. Am I correct in thinking that the 'driver' forms part of the operating system? And that the library is the non-GPL part that is the problem? If that is the case, the simple solution is to develop a GPL version of the library, but continue to use the driver. As Xiofan Chen pointed out, there is already an incomplete project at http://sourceforge.net/projects/ftd2xx IMHO the libusb-libftdi is a massive overkill that causes other problems for Windows users. Mainly because it is trying to replace the driver, not just the problematic library. My own problems with libusb-libftdi are: 1. I have 6 devices that are regularly used with my PC that use one form or another FTDI device. Because these are of varying ages, the drivers versions are different, they must be installed in a correct order or some of the devices fail. Why is this a problem?, because running FT_Clean in order to install libusb-libftdi will remove all of these drivers as well. 2. I have two other programs that make use of my JtagKey, replacing the driver with libusb-libftdi will break these programs. I may be wrong with one or more of my assumptions, if I am then please politely point this out, as I said at the start - I do not want propogate this war of words. My intention of replacing FTD2XX.lib with a GPL version is NOT an attempt to circumvent the GPL, such as the wrapper methods that have been suggested. I believe that if a GPL library was available, using the existing driver would not be a GPL violation, and the whole solution would be a cleaner more palatable solution for all. I kind of don't need to say this next bit ........ but what are your thoughts ;-) BR, Ian. _______________________________________________ Openocd-development mailing list [email protected] https://lists.berlios.de/mailman/listinfo/openocd-development
