[Tinyos-alliance] Re: Source licenses allowed in contrib

[Philippe Bonnet]

We are facing the GPL issue at the moment. We are working with a
company called Sensinode (based in finland). They are primarily
working with free rtos. We are porting TinyOS on their HW platforms
(micro and nano), trying to convert them.
We are reusing some of their code in our TinyOS port. That platform
specific code is under GPL.

The question is whether that kind of contribution (platform specific,
partly under GPL) should be part of the contrib distribution or
whether it should be in a separate repository external to the alliance
(possibly with a reference from the tinyos.net web site). I tend to
think that the second approach is cleaner.

Best regards,
Philippe.

On 12/15/06, Philip Levis <pal at cs.stanford.edu> wrote:
> On Dec 15, 2006, at 10:40 AM, Martin Leopold wrote:
>
> > Hi All.
> >> From my point of view I think it would be a good idea to allow a more
> > open license policy. Some people have strong feelings on one
> > license or
> > the other and imposing a boundary on what project we allow in
> > contrib or
> > not might discourage some project from ending up there. Projects that
> > are seeking to eventually be part of core would have to relicense
> > (according to the rules) or start out with a propper license.
> >
> > About the extra work: I don't think this is a major issue. Simply ask
> > the contributers to state which license they intend to use when they
> > create the project and to let us know about any changes.
> >
> > The only counter argument I can se is very hypothetical, and I
> > cannot se
> > this becoming a problem: if someone were to impose restrictions on the
> > distribution or redistribution of the code, we would have to check
> > that
> > we were not violating that restriction. Say if we were to decide to
> > make
> > a separate rpm for contrib.
> >
>
> That makes sense. We just need to come up with guidelines of which
> licenses would be allowed in contrib. In order to simplify things
> (and not put us in the spot of debating "what is open source?"), an
> approach such as "any license approved by OSI" might be a good way to
> go. This one would raise all of the GPL issues, though...
>
> Phil
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