Ah, there's all types of things going on here. It's an unusual one as string routines such as memcpy() are fundamental and self contained and pointless to reimplement. I want to share them almost as a gift, usable by anyone under any terms and, ideally, to allow third party improvements to be freely shared. We want the same routines to end up in Newlib, Bionic, and proprietary projects.
Copyright Linaro under the MIT/X11 license allows this, but the GLIBC steering committee prefers copyright FSF under the LGPL. MIT/X11 allows re-licensing but doesn't handle the copyright assignment.
I'm writing this up at the moment at: https://wiki.linaro.org/WorkingGroups/ToolChain/StringLicensing
Don't think of this as a ARM Inc. problem. There's many considerations involved here.
-- Michael
On Wed, Oct 6, 2010 at 2:35 PM, Nicolas Pitre nicolas.pitre@linaro.org wrote:
On Wed, 6 Oct 2010, Michael Hope wrote:
...are available here: https://wiki.linaro.org/WorkingGroups/ToolChain/Meetings/2010-10-04
A recording of the call is available here: http://tc.seabright.co.nz/toolchainwg/
Interesting topics include a discussion on the copyright and license issues on string routines, the upcoming 2010.10 release, the lifecycle of Linaro GCC 4.4, potential Windows builds, and the blueprints for next cycle.
From the minutes:
| * ARM wish to keep rights for anything ARM produces, perhaps | through back grant | * Future code will be done by Linaro, so by others | * Issue is with copyright instead of license | * MIT/X11 does allow relicensing | * ACTION: Does BSD allow relicensing? | * GLIBC is a interesting case | + GLIBC prefers copyright assignment to FSF and re-licensing | under the LGPL | + This assignment may inhibit Linaro from re-granting back to | ARM
Isn't the FSF copyright assignment non exclusive, i.e. the original copyright holder still keeps a right to do anything with his own copy?
Nicolas