-
Notifications
You must be signed in to change notification settings - Fork 80
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
Licence, author and copyright information unclear - SAA716x #237
Comments
This old story. saa716x driver based on NXP reference design. Now this discontinued product, all attemps upstream saa716x driver was rejected (dirty code, license and etc) |
You can find a saa716x driver with lots of checkpatch cleanups, license information, and credit for all involved developers at https://github.com/s-moch/linux-saa716x . |
Thank you both for your responses. Upstream have their standards and expect them to be met. Yes it can be frustrating, but once merged the support burden is then placed on them when APIs change, and dealing with rubbish code is then their pain. Licences are the legal contract and therefore have to be declared otherwise the code is useless. Legally I'd be unsure if any distribution could take this repo and ship the resulting modules, so users are forced to do the rebuild themselves. @s-moch I'll have a look at your tree and see what I can do. I've read through your thread with Mauro and others at https://lore.kernel.org/linux-media/50e5ba3c-4e32-f2e4-7844-150eefdf71b5@web.de/. I share your frustrations. Whilst it is an old card, there are still a load of them kicking around out there. Even for the more modern cards that use the tbsecp3 bridge, I note that https://github.com/tbsdtv/linux_media/blob/latest/drivers/media/pci/tbsecp3/tbsecp3-asi.c has no licence attributed to it, so that's a no-go either. I do appreciate the amount of effort you put into supporting these drivers, but the current ambiguous licencing position blocks others being confident in making use of your work, or trying to assist in upstreaming it. |
Not sure if I got all your points. There is no problem with my driver in meeting any technical upstream standards. Otherwise I would fix it. There is no licensing problem with my driver whatsoever. Where do you see a problem? The driver is and always was licensed GPL-2.0+, and this also is declared in all source files. The default branch of my driver is always the branch of the latest mainline kernel. This also represents the current development state, if no -test branches are available in my repository. |
Apologies @s-moch, most of my comments were over the code in this repository, not your branch. I totally get what you're doing in retaining all the commit history from parent trees where available, but adding 369 patches to a downstream tree is going to be a right royal pain in the proverbial. I'll see if I can sort a clean patch for TBS6284 and create a PR for you. |
I was going to pick up the drivers for TBS6284 and do a little clean up to them, with the thought of trying to upstream them.
However none of the files in https://github.com/tbsdtv/linux_media/tree/latest/drivers/media/pci/saa716x declare a licence, copyright, or author, therefore doing so is legally a grey area.
Those who did the work deserve the recognition.
The saa716x_budget module does declare the author to be Manu Abraham and GPL (no version specified), so can that be taken as gospel? Is he the copyright holder, or was he working for a company that hold the copyright?
There does appear to be a dev tree at https://cvs.linuxtv.org/manu/saa716x_new.git/tree/linux and https://www.linuxtv.org/wiki/index.php/NXP_SAA716x#Saa7162.2FSaa7161.2FSaa7160_driver_development references him working on a GPL driver.
For what it's worth I have the card now running happily on a Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4.
My in-progress branch is at https://github.com/6by9/linux/tree/rpi-5.10.y-tbs. I've trimmed it down to the saa716x cards where the demod and tuner are largely supported in mainline, and then started addressing the large number of checkpatch warnings.
Thanks
The text was updated successfully, but these errors were encountered: