Zach Welch pisze: > The big problem with gray areas is that you can be sued anyway
And who is going to sue the developers of OpenOCD? Really - aren't you talking about a non-existent imaginary enemy that will never show up? > Inevitably, that means that you will be back to > complying with the terms of the GPL, everyone gains the pleasure of > paying their lawyers to learn more about the license, and maybe worse. Why isn't that so "obvious" to me or others who share my view on this situation? > The community would be well advised to avoid these risks: use libftdi. Aren't you using JLink? If that's true, I think that you are all "I don't care about the FT2232 performance and ease of use, so use libftdi". > I would be just as opposed to such circumvention as I would to linking > to it directly, but I believe the legality of this strategy is suspect. > Quite simply, an exception to the LGPL would create a new license, and > the modified legal verbiage would no longer be compatible with the GPL. Again - anyone who will have a problem with that situation IMHO is just a GPL-or-die kind of guy, who puts some words (The Mighty Licence) in front of popularity of OpenOCD and open-source in general. This is really that simple - what is more important to you - lots of people using your code (OpenOCD) or compliance to The Mighty License at the cost of making OpenOCD an underground project for h4x0r-g33ks? I bet that FT2232 is the most popular type of ARM-JTAG among the users of OpenOCD now and that is NOT going to change any time soon. > To reiterate my earlier statements on this subject, I will consider > distribution of any OpenOCD binary that links to FTD2XX to be a > violation of the GPL. If the libftd2xx library loads in the OpenOCD > process, then distributing the binary would violate the GPL. So? > I have contributed enough to OpenOCD now that anyone contravening this > interpretation will be directly opposing the wishes of a copyright > holder who sees things that way. I would expect this should seriously > impair the defense of any violations found in the future: the community > has been explicitly warned not to do this. This is black and white. Sure - every copyright holder has a right to kill the project. That's what you all are doing now - forbidding the use of ftd2xx when there is NO good alternative. And believe me - if 1% of users will build his/hers own version of OpenOCD which uses ftd2xx that's all. > The "best solution" is to fix libftdi; it is a replacement for FTD2XX. > I will say it again: libusb and libftdi can be improved to do anything > that the proprietary alternative does. Addressing any remaining issues > with those libraries (e.g. driver certification) will cost pennies on > the dollar when compared to what should be expected from trying to > circumvent the binary distribution restrictions of the GPL. Sure they can be improved - in a year, two or maybe ten. Until then OpenOCD will be forgotten on Windows and most people will probably just use something like CrossWorks (legal or not). It starts to look like the "battle againt piracy" - the companies think they are winning, but in reality just more and more people stop caring about "legality" just like now - more and more people will don't care about GPL as in this situation it is not good - it is an obstacle. Now - let me say this again. ftd2xx.dll is a NATURAL solution for Windows not just because I say so... 1. ALL the drivers for FT2232 based JTAGs for Windows posted somewhere online are based on that library. This won't change in a day, not even two... Creating your own driver is not a "piece of cake". Removing the ftd2xx.dll is not easy too. 2. libftdi+libusb-win32 are CRAP compared to ftd2xx - they DO NOT support composite USB devices (let's reiterate this - FT2232 IS a composite device). Using a hacked BINARY version is just the same GPL violation as the ftd2xx, as the source for it is NOT PUBLISHED as far as I know. 3. libftdi is MUCH slower than ftd2xx. 4. libftdi does not support serial ports that are present on majority of ft2232 based JTAGs and so on... and so on... For me - there is NO alternative to ftd2xx. Maybe someday there will be, but now there is none. 4\/3!! _______________________________________________ Openocd-development mailing list Openocd-development@lists.berlios.de https://lists.berlios.de/mailman/listinfo/openocd-development
