Yeelong and SiliconMotion driver: asking for developers

[Daniel Clark]

On Wed, Mar 10, 2010 at 5:16 AM, Daniel Stone <daniel at fooishbar.org> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> On Wed, Mar 10, 2010 at 08:51:56AM +0000, Owain Ainsworth wrote:
>> On Tue, Mar 09, 2010 at 10:22:28PM -0430, Octavio Rossell wrote:
>> > The idea of this wiki:
>> > http://gnu.org.ve/~octavio/lemote/doku.php?id=siliconmotiondriver
>> > is to collect all info for makin this easy. If any of you have more info
>> > or has a technical correction is ok (is on free editing mode) but is
>> > only a space where to put the info with an universal scope.
>>
>> Can you please clarify what the comments about GPLv3 are supposed to
>> mean on that page? Is it a reference to a non-public discussion?
>>
>> If the current driver is licensed under the MIT/X11 license (as it would
>> appear that it is) changing it without adding substantial new work is
>> legally questionable at best. Furthermore, changing this license after
>> adding to it could be considered to be obnoxious and anti-community.
>
> Anyone's free to tack on a more restrictive license to their work, which
> would bring the entire collection under the same license, but yeah, it
> would be incredibly obnoxious.  X.Org's does not (currently) accept GPL
> packages anyway, so we couldn't merge it back.
>
> I heard vague rumblings about the FSF convincing Silicon Motion to
> relicense it as GPLv3+ in private, with complete disregard for X.Org.
> Good for the FSF: maybe they can do all the work on it then.

I believe the issue there was that FSF needed some small subset of
code dual-licensed to be able to incorporate it into GRUB2, which is
GPLv3 - GRUB2 is very close to being able to be the only boot firmware
on the actual hardware PLCC chip of the yeeloong, and of course would
load before Xorg.

I don't believe there is any intent to actually try to relicense X; as
you are probably aware FSF has in the past helped the X project with
licensing issues - http://www.fsf.org/news/thank-you-sgi - and knowing
the people involved I sincerely doubt there is any intention to do
anything that would splinter the Xorg codebase.

-- 
Daniel JB Clark | http://pobox.com/~dclark | Activist; Owner
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