On Sun, May 24, 2020 at 7:58 AM Alan Carvalho de Assis <acas...@gmail.com> wrote: > Some months ago I suggested that NuttX could focus only in the kernel > and we could create an external distribution using some build system > like buildroot, yocto, etc. But as some people pointed, maybe a great > strength of NuttX is to have everything integrated.
That is a strength of NuttX, and it would be a shame to ruin it for no technical reason and only because we can't find an acceptable way to deal with licenses and where to keep code... ...which is why I think the "glue code" idea is best for 3rd party code that we want to integrate. With "glue code": * We do not have to copy 3rd party projects into our repository. * We do not need external non-Apache-project repositories. * We do not have to copy 3rd party projects into external non-Apache-project repositories. All we do is develop "glue code" which comprises Kconfig files, Make.defs files, and possibly patch files. Those would be developed by us. Those would be part of Apache NuttX. Those would have the Apache license. We would NOT copy any 3rd party projects into our repositories. When users select those items in Kconfig, our build system will invoke the "glue code" which will download/clone (if not already present) the 3rd party project onto the user's machine and build that code as part of their NuttX build. Our glue code could be smart: For example if a 3rd party library is GPL, in our glue code, it would depend on "CONFIG_ALLOW_GPL_LICENSE" or something like that. So the end user will have to decide if GPL is suitable, and if yes, select to allow it, and then select whatever GPL 3rd party code they want to have it built and included in their image. There is no problem with licensing with this approach. There are no hostile forks. There is no need to ask permission, SGAs, etc. because we are not copying 3rd party code into our repositories. And you can integrate every FOSS project in the world with NuttX. Because: We are only developing glue code and we own the glue code. People can choose to activate it if they want to, or not. If they want to, they accept the licenses of the 3rd party code that they will download. The only concern I can see with this is: What happens if I, as a user of NuttX, depend on external projects, and those external projects disappear from the Internet. Well, the answer is that our glue code should allow you to customize the download/clone location. So, as a user of NuttX, you can create your own local clone of 3rd party code, so that if the original disappears from the Internet, you have a copy. That becomes the user's responsibility. We don't copy any 3rd party code into our repositories. We do have to solve the issue of Kconfig. That has disappeared from the Internet and we depend on it. We were told, before we joined Apache, that sometimes ASF does allow to mirror well-known FOSS tools. So we'll have to look at that. Nathan
