Am Freitag 24 Februar 2012, 20:17:19 schrieb Mike Frysinger: > On Friday 24 February 2012 13:10:36 Michael Walle wrote: > > As far as i know applications can use functions defined in exports.h > > without being licensed under the GPL. > > correct, that is what the COPYING file states > > > Who is responsible to define which functions are exported? Are the > > currently exported functions the only ones available to closed source > > applications or is it possible to add further ones which are needed. > > someone posts a request and the maintainers evaluate it. typically the > exported funcs should be "high level" and not hooks into u-boot internals. > > > Functions may need arguments which are pointers to some structures. These > > structures are likely be defined in some GPL'ed header file and must not > > be used, i guess? So the exported functions must only use integral data > > types, opaque pointers and structures which are not defined in a GPL'ed > > header file. > > which is why the exported funcs are "high level" and not ones that get into > low level stuff that would necessitate passing structs. the other problem > with struct passing is that they tend to break the ABI layer. > -mike
Then i guess there is no way to support a board which has only evil closed source drivers for its networking card. That is, i can't export eth_register() to register my ops defined in the blob without violating the GPL. Even if the headers for the "struct eth_device" were public domain, this mechanism would be sth like 'linking' against the uboot, wouldn't it? -- Michael _______________________________________________ U-Boot mailing list U-Boot@lists.denx.de http://lists.denx.de/mailman/listinfo/u-boot
