Re: [Freeipmi-users] SUNBMC failure

[Dave Love]

Al Chu <address@hidden> writes:

> GPL and the CDDL (the Sun license) have incompatibilities with each
> other (see http://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html), which is why
> I did it this way.  However, it appears the incompatibilities may exist
> only w/ linking and not with code.  So presumably I could copy the code
> in.  But I'm not sure.  I've been trying to figure this out, but as you
> can expect, licenses are hard to understand :-)  I'll ask around, see if
> I can tweak this or not.

Sure if it was CDDL code, you couldn't distribute it to combine with
GPL'ed code unless the copyright holders on all the GPL code allowed an
exception.  However, as I understand it, a header with no code isn't a
problem.  Anyway, what I pointed to is BSD-ish, not CDDL, which is why I
think there's no problem -- you'd just need to add the copyright notice
at most.  That version is trivially different to the one in OpenSolaris.

> Hmmm.  I think the reason it fails like that on Linux is b/c /dev/bmc
> doesn't exist.  This is in contrast to Solaris where /dev/bmc does
> exist, but something doesn't allow the code to work with it (thus
> "device not found" would not be a good error code).  Looking through the
> error code list, IPMI_ERR_DEVICE_NOT_SUPPORTED is probably the better
> one.  Sound like a good error code to change to?

Right, that sounds right -- definitely better than an internal error.
If you can just distribute the header, it's moot anyway.

For what it's worth, here's the meat of the licence on bmc_intf.h from
ipmitool:

 * Redistribution and use in source and binary forms, with or without
 * modification, are permitted provided that the following conditions
 * are met:
 * 
 * Redistribution of source code must retain the above copyright
 * notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer.
 * 
 * Redistribution in binary form must reproduce the above copyright
 * notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer in the
 * documentation and/or other materials provided with the distribution.