On Wednesday 11 December 2013, Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton wrote:
Allwinner Tech have written explicitly to us - and the message has been published - that any code released by them which contains GPL code (despite one of the Managers acting in direct violation of the Director's instructions to honour GPL compliance by ordering employees to *remove* any such Copyright notices - an action for which he eventually lost his job) is to be released under the GPL.
that is just... wow. would be good to have it (maybe published somewhere to back why are we doing it) and then just reverse all the copyright of allwinner-boot
we are aware that there is (or was) in use, thanks to reports given to us by the employees, a script which is consistently used to remove the allwinnertech domain name and replace it with "reillumatech", as well as remove all GPL Copyright notices. there is a "reverse" script provided by the linux-sunxi community which undoes the damage done by that script.
ha, interesting, is it in sunxi-tools?
so when you say "that version will need to be GPL'd", it already is.
if this is a problem marco i can explicitly pass on a request to Allwinner Tech however the response - if one is received in a timely manner - will most likely be exactly the same as the previous one, along the lines of "yes you have permission to put GPL Copyright notices on that code" when in fact we already have permission to do exactly that [on their behalf].
if we already have it.. should be enough, we just need to keep records i think
normal practice is for the Copyright holders to do that, and to make the modifications to the files themselves and to explictly publish the files as modified by them. however this is not a normal situation.
so, to be clear: you may not *assume* that the code is GPL'd: permission and instructions have *already been given* that it *is* GPL'd, *despite* notices on the files which state otherwise.
very very "interesting" ;)
so. even tough i'll make more experiments on why the latest version of allwinner-boot is failing (that's the technical problem part), if you have some kind of record of this, we could go on changingthe license headers on my branch.. (kinda unconfortable doing it in my branch without some proof that backs this;) among other stuff, like it seems it's using a binary only app for something (but not for the file we need apparently since i tried to replace it with a shell script that does exactly nothing and it keeps working) so i would remove all the parts that we don't need to make the things a bit more understandable
Cheers, Marco Martin