[Openocd-development] License

[Dominic <Dom...@gm...>]

Dear List,

1) I wont support any action against someone who distributes OpenOCD binaries 
linked against FTD2XX as long as there's no viable alternative. When I wrote 
the OpenOCD the liberties of potential users were paramount, and this hasn't 
changed. There is no viable alternative to FTD2XX on Windows, and from what 
I've read this is going to get worse with Vista and Windows 7.

Could actually be funny to watch a GPL case where the original copyright 
holder states that he sees no problem in linking his GPL licensed code with a 
proprietary library that is clearly no derivative work of his code... that 
doesn't even sound too unreasonable... even the GPL FAQ says that linking 
proprietary libraries "may" impose legal issues 
(http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#FSWithNFLibs)

2) The OpenOCD project itself released binaries linked against FTD2XX on its 
Berlios page, for example openocd-cygwin-ftd2xx-20060213.tar.gz. I don't think 
it's totally unreasonable to extrapolate some right of distributing 
OpenOCD+FTD2XX based on this...

3) I would be willing to add a license exception that allows linking with the 
FTD2XX library and I invite other major contributors to do the same. The 
result may not be a OpenOCD rev. 2000+ that's accompanied with this exception, 
but I suppose we might find some revision where we can formally grant our 
users a right they have been executing for almost four years.

Regards,

Dominic