DRM radeon i2c support and GPL

Kean Johnston kean at armory.com
Tue Sep 21 00:58:20 PDT 2004


> I picked a very simple piece of code to start out with as a test case.
> The I2C code is only a hundred lines and could be rewritten. But
> what's the point, BSD doesn't have Linux's I2C driver system. This
> code has no value anywhere but on Linux.
That's not a statement thats safe to make. BSD (or any other OS
that XOrg supports) may not have Linux's I2C driver system. TODAY.
What if, next week, BSD gets such a beast, or HP-UX does, or
Solaris or whatever. Maybe now that code that is currently only
of value on Linux is of value on a broad range of systems. Now
you have the potential for a broad range of non-GPL systems to
be dependent on GPL code, which is, after all, the point I think
the original strawman paper was addressing.

If XOrg is trying to be "license agnostic", it is going to need
to stay away from the GPL. The current MIT style license seems to
be quite acceptable to GPL-centric projects. However, the reverse
is not (always) true.

Kean



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