DRM radeon i2c support and GPL

[Eric Anholt]

On Tue, 2004-09-21 at 02:48, Alan Cox wrote:
> On Maw, 2004-09-21 at 08:58, Kean Johnston wrote:
> > That's not a statement thats safe to make. BSD (or any other OS
> > that XOrg supports) may not have Linux's I2C driver system. TODAY.
> > What if, next week, BSD gets such a beast, or HP-UX does, or
> 
> Well they can't use the low level Linux code anyway, because its GPL
> licensed and likely to stay that way.

Ugh.  Of course that wouldn't happen.  Not even implementing internal
kernel interfaces, which is all that could apply for Kean's suggestion.

> > If XOrg is trying to be "license agnostic", it is going to need
> > to stay away from the GPL. The current MIT style license seems to
> > be quite acceptable to GPL-centric projects. However, the reverse
> > is not (always) true.
> 
> Thats a shame. I guess its time to take DRI back out of the Xorg tree if
> this kind of extremist view is the preferred one, or just keep the
> kernel code in the Linux kernel and remove it from X.org ?

I'll stick my two cents in here, as a BSD DRI maintainer.  I don't think
it matters if Linux-only DRM bits are GPLed, as long as they're clearly
licensed appropriately (copyright header at the top, or describing which
lines are GPLed of a file otherwise MIT-licensed).  I was very bothered
by Jon's suggestion that a lot of the code could be GPLed by accident or
something, as if that license would have infected the entire DRM
(including shared bits) while nobody was looking.  If someone feels that
there is GPLed code in there, it should be looked into and documented
immediately, or that vague stick should stop being waved.

IMO, X.Org should care about the DRM for its purposes as the kernel part
of the DRI -- the 3d bits, not the i2c bits or whatever other linux
bits, as long as X.Org and the DRI/DRM (drm/shared) remains portable to
other platforms without depending on the GPLed bits, which I don't think
is on the horizon at all.

-- 
Eric Anholt                                eta at lclark.edu          
http://people.freebsd.org/~anholt/         anholt at FreeBSD.org