[Tinyos-devel] Re: [Tinyos Core WG] Re: non-TEP code

[Philip Levis]

On Jan 30, 2007, at 12:12 AM, Joe Polastre wrote:

>> I think it depends how many people work on it. After the initial
>> flurry of emails, no-one (including you) followed up on the issue, so
>> it moved to the back burner.
>
> In that case, Gil and I will contribute a driver.  After contribution,
> you can provide input.

Ah, that's what it all boils down to, doesn't it? But if you want it  
to be in the core, it needs to go through the core WG. Otherwise, the  
WG is left holding the bag for arbitrary code maintenance. That being  
said, Gil has been a saint in terms of following process, so that  
sounds like a good plan to move things forward.

>
>> IIRC, the last discussion on contrib licenses was "mostly OSI
>> licenses." That is, you can pick from almost any of the standard OSI
>> licenses. The "almost any" is mostly because of GPL. Due to the fact
>> that TinyOS doesn't have linking, the GPL makes things tricky and so
>> is out. The consensus came to this due to the problems of trying to
>> agree on what "open source" is. Rather than have the contrib
>> caretakers go down that rathole (and find they didn't read a piece of
>> legal fine print), the conclusion was to just take the OSI's word for
>> it.
>
> The problem here is how does a company adopt the IBM license?  the
> Apache license?  Obviously if I adopt the IBM license, I intend to
> replace "IBM" with "company X".  Now it is no longer the IBM license.
> How does the alliance deal with this condition?
>

The assumption was that you can of course replace the names. The  
issue is with adding terms or changing wording.

> What about LGPL?

That's pretty clearly a no. If you compile together, then the viral  
takes over. In theory, someone could develop LGPL libraries for  
binary components, but given how common binary components are maybe  
it's better to leave this edge case until it comes up.

Phil