Hi Jan,
you are looking at the end-result of a long history of license changes
in Etherboot. Way back at the dawn of time, Etherboot consisted of code
from different contributors that had licensed their contributions as
BSD, GPL or PD, respectively.
While we were careful in paying attention to the different (partially)
incompatible license conditions, this was awkward, as it restricted how
we could release the code. And it made it complicated to determine
whether certain combinations were valid.
If my records are accurate, the team finally got all these issues sorted
out some time before 2000, when we had tracked down all the different
sources of the code and decided that everything in the core of Etherboot
was either BSD licensed or PD licensed (i.e. any license compatible with
but even less restrictive than BSD). At the time, the core of Etherboot
was released as a BSD licensed package, and the CS89x0 driver lived as a
separate GPL'd patch in the contrib directory.
Since we knew that this approach might still violate the spirit of the
license on the CS89x0 driver, even if it was OK from a legal point of
view, we asked Russ if he was OK with this arrangement. I have an old
e-mail saying that he gave us permission to do so, but asked for the
extra statement clarifying that this permission only applied to the
Etherboot project and not to just any open source project. He was
arguably concerned that somebody might get confused into believing he
had meant to relicense his code as BSD, and wanted to clarify that this
was not the case. This is the statement that you now stumbled across.
A little while later, BSD licenses changed, and were now believe to be
fully compatible with the GPL. At that point in time, we tracked down
all the contributors to the Etherboot project that we could find, and
asked them whether they would be OK with relicensing the whole code base
as GPL. We believed that the new BSD license already gave us permission
to do so, but we wanted to make sure that everybody on the team agreed
with this choice.
At that point, the special notice in the CS89x0 source became
irrelevant, as it only ever applied to the aggregation of the GPL'd
patch file with the BSD licensed core package. But for some reason it
never got removed.
We also informed Russ of the licensing change for the rest of Etherboot,
and as far as I remember he was happy with it.
So, I do not believe there really is a problem with this particular
statement in the Etherboot version of Russ's CS89x0 driver. But I do
agree that its intention is hard to discern from current context, and
its need has long been obsoleted. If Russ is OK with this, I suggest
that Marty remove this particular line from future downloads of the
source available from rom-o-matic.net and etherboot.org.
The point about GPL version 1 versus version 2 is valid, though. I had
not noticed that before, but I am sure Russ will be able to clarify his
intentions. I do suspect that it again has historical reasons more than
legal ones, but would not want to presume to speak for Russ.
Markus
Jan Lübbe wrote:
Hello Russ,
Your driver for the cs89x0 network card is used in the etherboot
package. The copyright/license statements are a bit problematic for
Debian as cs89x0.h file states "This program is free software; you can
redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General
Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, version 1."
This license statement is currently also in the Linux kernel source
(which makes it incompatible to the rest of Linux).
This license makes it incompatible with the rest of etherboot which is
GPLv2.
cs89x0.c states: "Permission is granted to distribute the enclosed
cs89x0.[ch] driver only in conjunction with the Etherboot package. The
code is ordinarily distributed under the GPL."
Could you please clarify what you mean by "only in conjunction with the
Etherboot package", as this conflicts with the GPL.
Would you be willing to relicense your contributions under the GPLv2
without additional restrictions?
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