Sorry, I should clarify my earlier post. I did not mean to insinuate that ARM (or their lawyers) have created this problem.
However, they are the author's and copyright holders of the code in question. Nico asked specifically about the FSF assignment, and my answer was aimed at that specific situation. I just tried to make the facts as I understood them pleasant to read, but I apologize if my wording was in any way offensive to ARM. As you have correctly pointed out, the situation is far more complex than that singular facet.
No, this problem derives from the mess of intellectual property laws that must be respected in order to preserve the integrity of the myriad of projects that want to be using this code, while still allowing all future improvements to flow seamless between them. It's a complicated situation fraught with legal pitfalls, and I seriously doubt that anyone involved meant to create it.
I am sure we all wish that these matters would just resolve themselves.
On 10/05/2010 07:47 PM, Michael Hope wrote:
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