Skip to content
New issue

Have a question about this project? Sign up for a free GitHub account to open an issue and contact its maintainers and the community.

By clicking “Sign up for GitHub”, you agree to our terms of service and privacy statement. We’ll occasionally send you account related emails.

Already on GitHub? Sign in to your account

License information for "network stack" in README is incomplete #317

Open
JayFoxRox opened this issue Apr 11, 2020 · 2 comments
Open

License information for "network stack" in README is incomplete #317

JayFoxRox opened this issue Apr 11, 2020 · 2 comments

Comments

@JayFoxRox
Copy link
Member

The README implies that the network stack using lwIP is "License: Modified BSD".

However, this is not complete. The stack is also using pktdrv, which is AFL 2.0 licensed. This would be important as AFL is incompatible with the GPL.

Personally I don't believe that pktdrv can even be AFL licensed, considering it's obviously decompiled/disassembled from the MS kernel, or based on MMIO traces.
It's probably legally sketchy to begin with, but also mostly factual (i.e. non-copyrightable).

Even if it was based on the "forcedeth Linux nForce driver" as it claims (even though it looks nothing alike), then it would be GPLv2+, not AFL.

Anyhow, as-is, we should document that pktdrv is AFL, or we should cleanup pktdrv and slap something more open on it (like CC0 with disclaimer about the roots of it), assuming the original author almost certainly had no right to put their license on it either.

@thrimbor
Copy link
Member

I think the forcedeth comment refers exclusively to the constant definitions. I don't think this drags in the GPLv2, it's basically just giving names to values.
I'm personally not sure about the origin of the code, but afair the MS code did TX descriptor chaining, which Pktdrv doesn't support (currently)? I'm not very familiar with MS's network stack, though.

The init code is probably non-copyrightable, and I'm currently changing quite a bit of the other code. It'll probably be fine to put another license on it then - I'd personally prefer if we get approval by the original author, but I don't think that's likely to happen.

@DobaMuffin
Copy link

What is currently going on with pktdrv? I know it's still AFL V2, but I'm wondering if there are any other pieces of software that can be adapted for the nxdk.

Sign up for free to join this conversation on GitHub. Already have an account? Sign in to comment
Labels
None yet
Development

No branches or pull requests

3 participants