[coreboot] Licensing question

[Scott Duplichan]

-----Original Message-----
From: coreboot-bounces+scott=notabs.org at coreboot.org [mailto:coreboot-bounces+scott=notabs.org at coreboot.org] On Behalf Of Rudolf
Marek
Sent: Friday, December 17, 2010 06:08 PM
To: Vibrans, Frank
Cc: Simpson, Gary; coreboot at coreboot.org
Subject: Re: [coreboot] Licensing question

]Hello Frank,

]Thanks for the great news! Please do you know what kind of BSD license it is? 
]The "two clause"/"three clause"?

> The Open Source Review Board of AMD has decided the upcoming release of
> Agesa and the chipset CIM modules for our Family14h CPU will be under a
> dual license: GPLv2 and BSD. As the coreboot community, do you have any
> issue with this? If not, are there any specific coreboot requirements
> that must be met because of the dual license scheme? Thanks for your help.

]I'm not aware of any issues so far. I'm perfectly fine with GPLv2. However for 
]dual licensing scheme some kind of policy of what changes are under what license 
]must be adopted/developed. I can tell now only "I don't know/I cannot think out 
]any implications out of that"

]I hope others will jump in eventually with some ideas how to handle that. Most 
]likely we can assume what linux kernel folks are doing (and avoid kind of flame 
]wars in this topic).

]As a side note, I would like to ask about the permissions for example to 
]redistribute the VGA ROM images/EC images/Microcode is this covered somehow in 
]the release also?

Yes, I was supposed to ask about this but have not done so yet. The last
time I saw it, the family 14h agesa already included the SMU binary image
(F14NbSmuFirmware.h) and microcode patch images (F14MicrocodePatchxxx.c).
Adding the video option rom (vbios) image and EC image using the same
license would be most helpful. It is possible that AMD has already done this.

A related request is for microcode patch and vbios images for older platforms.
Coreboot does include some licensed family 10h microcode patches, but I am
not sure that they are current. It is awkward to ask each coreboot developer
to extract vbios and/or microcode patch binaries from his production BIOS.
It would be useful to have a better way for a coreboot developer to obtain
vbios and microcode patch binaries for the AMD family 10h platforms.

]How is the plan to integrate to code into Coreboot?

AMD has already done the integration. I wouldn't be surprised if coreboot+
seabios is booting Windows on the reference board now. Everyone needs to
set aside some money for purchase of an AMD family 14h netbook when they
go on sale in a few weeks. Putting coreboot on these units should be
fairly easy.

Thanks,
Scott

]I hope other developers share some ideas too (especially if I missed something)

]Thank you,
]Rudolf