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matthewlloyd believes that distributing a bootloader and Marlin on the same flash memory makes them one large program, so Marlin's GPLv3 license should cover bo
by rrss 5y ago
matthewlloyd believes that distributing a bootloader and Marlin on the same flash memory makes them one large program, so Marlin's GPLv3 license should cover both. Prusa believes that the bootloader and Marlin are two separate programs aggregated together, so they can have separate licenses.
It does not make sense to me to consider a bootloader and whatever it boots to be one program. seems like GRUB (GPLv3) generally is not considered to infect everything it boots / chainloads.
> Where's the line between two separate programs, and one program with two parts? This is a legal question, which ultimately judges will decide. We believe that a proper criterion depends both on the mechanism of communication (exec, pipes, rpc, function calls within a shared address space, etc.) and the semantics of the communication (what kinds of information are interchanged).
https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html
- PragmaticPulp 5y agoI don’t see any way this holds up. The bootloader hands off execution to a separate program, so they have about as minimal communication as possible. They don’t even run at the same time. It also doesn’t make sense to consider different, independently engineered pieces to be one in the same simply because they were shipped on the same storage medium.
- gjsman-1000 5y agoOtherwise, would GRUB or the old LILO literally force your entire OS to be GPL? That would be insanity.
- macksd 5y agoYeah, this seems like an even weaker connection than disibributing a GNU/Linux-based VM or Docker image with a non-GPL/LGPL application in it.
- amelius 5y ago> It does not make sense to me to consider a bootloader and whatever it boots to be one program. Yes the name says it: a bootloader loads some other program into memory.