Messages in this thread | | | Date | Sun, 26 May 2002 01:16:20 +0200 | From | Robert Schwebel <> | Subject | Re: patent on O_ATOMICLOOKUP [Re: [PATCH] loopable tmpfs (2.4.17)] |
| |
On Sat, May 25, 2002 at 02:05:32PM -0700, Larry McVoy wrote: > s/same core idea/same core code/
Not true. Please note that the RTHAL (Realtime Hardware Abstraction Layer) which is the core of RTAI was even available under DOS in Paolo Mantegazza's group before it was ported to Linux.
> Go search around, get the code you can still find on the net and start > diffing.
This may be true for early versions of RTAI, where everybody thought that we are all working together in a friendly way as we have been used to in the Linux community.
The core has been completely reworked since then¹ - and it nevertheless is under the GPL, so there is absolutely no problem with that. When there came up doubts about the legal status of the stuff being under the LGPL in former times the RTAI team has immediately investigated this, with the result of the license situation we have today.
> So not only do the RTAI people have an issue with the patent, it looks > like they'd better be conforming to the GPL as well.
We do. Show us where we don't and we will immediately change it.
> Didn't RTAI switch the copyright on "their" sourcebase to LGPL?
It's different. There is the RTHAL patch, which goes into the kernel. This one is GPL, as well as the HRT schedulers.
All the infrastructure modules providing things like FIFOs, mailboxes, tasklets and stuff are under the LGPL, meaning "give back when modifying it, but be able to built something ontop of it which doesn't have to be free".
Robert ¹ There are surely small things which cannot be implemented in another way - try to write a counting loop in another way than for (i=0; i<N; i++) {printf(i);} -- +--------------------------------------------------------+ | Dipl.-Ing. Robert Schwebel | http://www.pengutronix.de | | Pengutronix - Linux Solutions for Science and Industry | | Braunschweiger Str. 79, 31134 Hildesheim, Germany | | Phone: +49-5121-28619-0 | Fax: +49-5121-28619-4 | +--------------------------------------------------------+ - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
| |