Cautionary Word on Licenses and Intellectual Property

[Joel Sherrill]

Quality Quorum wrote:
> 
> On Sun, 29 Oct 2000, Joel Sherrill wrote:
> 
> >
> > Privately, I have discussed these issues with many people
> > over the years.  My rule of thumb is to honor the
> > intellectual property and license of others.  But as
> > this particular case points out, you need to be careful
> > when looking at proprietary source code.
> >
> >   Say "No, thanks" to Offers of Illegal MS Source Code
> >
> >   http://noframes.linuxjournal.com/articles/currents/0024.html
> >
> > It includes this quote:
> >
> >   Jeremy Allison, one of the lead developers on the Samba project,
> >   said that his response to one anonymous offer of Windows NT
> >   source code was, "You're offering to end my career. Thanks, but
> >   no thanks."
> >
> > The bottom line is that everyone involved in the free software
> > community needs to be careful to remain uncontaminated.  Do NOT
> > look at proprietary source code and then work on an open source
> > or free software equivalent.
> >
> > Be careful and play nice. :)
> 
> I have a quaestion in this respect. I am working on adding thread
> support to i386 gdb stub. Most of it is not RTEMS-specific. I am
> wondering can other people borrow from RTEMS code or I have to
> have two parallel projects one for RTEMS and one for something
> abstract. As far as my reading goes everything inside
> c/src/lib/libbsp/i386/shared/comm is given to public domain by
> contributors, does it allow to use these pieces outside RTEMS ?

My reading of the notice in the files you are referring to
indicates that you are correct.  I assume this notice is what 
you are referring to:

 * This software is Copyright (C) 1998 by T.sqware - all rights limited
 * It is provided in to the public domain "as is", can be freely
modified
 * as far as this copyight notice is kept unchanged, but does not imply
 * an endorsement by T.sqware of the product in which it is included.   

I don't see any reason this code can't be used in anyway you want as
long as you keep T.sqware's notice intact.

Someone correct me if that was not the intent.
 
> >
> > --joel
> >
> 
> Thanks,
> 
> Aleksey

-- 
Joel Sherrill, Ph.D.             Director of Research & Development
joel at OARcorp.com                 On-Line Applications Research
Ask me about RTEMS: a free RTOS  Huntsville AL 35805
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