Hi all, Last week, I had a conference call with Dan Ravicher, Legal Director of the Software Freedom Law Center, and two of his colleagues. He helped answer some questions that came up for me during the licensing debate. Further, he has generously offered to take questions from the community regarding our licensing situation; individuals may contact him directly at the SFLC via e-mail, phone, or mail.
The key points: OpenOCD is GPL, and binaries linked to FTDI's library cannot be distributed legally. I have legal standing to enforce GPL compliance independently of other authors, though I am not alone in wanting compliance. I intend to enforce the GPL for 0.2.0 and future releases, so this message serves as a warning to anyone that intends to distribute a solution that may violate the license terms. This is also a reminder that past violations will be forgiven; only future violators will be met with letters from the SFLC, on the behalf of those copyright holders that wish to enforce the GPL license. As I said before, my compliance efforts will not be for personal gain. Any profits will be donated to a free software organization, preferably one where the funds can be used to help the OpenOCD community. Early and full compliance will be preferred, and several possible solutions have been presented and can be located in the mailing list archives. If you have a copyright stake in OpenOCD and want to enforce the GPL, please feel free to talk with Dan about your concerns. While some may be unwilling to cooperate, others retain their rights to seek legal redress for violations. I continue to hope that such remedies never need to be employed, as these matters distract from productive development activity. In addition to the SFLC, I contacted FTDI and received confirmation that developers may enter into an NDA to obtain their protocol documentation. With that, libftdi can be made to perform competitively. With this information confirmed, I reiterate: I think this should be the preferred solution, despite any apparent viability of other potential options. Cheers, Zach _______________________________________________ Openocd-development mailing list [email protected] https://lists.berlios.de/mailman/listinfo/openocd-development
