License for ROM images in mollib/pci_roms?

[Samuel Rydh]

On Mon, Nov 04, 2002 at 04:19:38PM +0900, Jens Schmalzing wrote:
> a user of the Debian package of MOL has asked whether the ROM images
> distributed in mollib/pci_roms are really under a free license.

OK... I'll explain the licensing below.

Btw. the name of the folder is a bit mislearding. It think I should
rename it to drivers or binaries; the old name is an artifact from
the old oldworld days when all drivers were encoded as PCI-roms.

> The statements in the source code seem to indicate this, is it really
> true?  If not, what is the actual situation?

- mods.mkext
This one contains the OSX drivers. Most of the drivers are based upon
Apple's drivers, so the license is the Apple Public Source License.

- osi_video.x
Video driver for OSX (uses the same source osi_video.nw).

- osi_video.nw osi_blk.nw osi_enet.nw
MacOS drivers. I don't know if these can be put under the GPL
since the code is based upon example code from Apple (these
drivers predates the Apple Public Source License so it clearly does
not apply). I'm not sure the license terms for the example code
were very clearly stated, but Apple provides the examples as
a starting point for driver development so putting it under
a free license should not be a problem.

- osi_scsi.nw osi_scsi.pcirom
Obsolete, but otherwise as above.

- osi_sound.pcirom osi_video.pcirom osi_enet.pcirom osi_blk.pcirom
pci-ROM tokenized versions of *.nw for oldworld booting (same
license). 

- bootx
MacOS X boot loader. This is a slightly modified version of
Apple's BootX loader and it has an Apple's Public Source License.

- of
This is the OpenFirmware implementaion mol uses to boot MacOS
and Linux. It doesn't do forth interpreting but conforms otherwise
to the IEEE 1275 (draft) standard. It is used to load newworld
ROMs and yaboot (for Linux booting). It is GPL.

The source can be obtained from the following BK repositories:

 bootx:			http://mol.bkbits.net:8080/bootx-mol
 of:			http://mol.bkbits.net:8080/of-mol
 mods.mkext:		http://mol.bkbits.net:8080/osx-drivers
 osi_{blk,video}.*:	http://mol.bkbits.net:8080/mac-drivers
 osi_{sound,scsi}.*	MOL-drivers-0.9.51.sit (mol download page)

The of and bootx stuff is compiled under Linux. The rest must
be compiled under either MacOS or MacOS X.

All the binaries above run within the MOL session and they are
coupled to MOL and the linux side through a syscall interface.
Running non-GPL code in this manner might slightly violate the
mol GPL license. If necessary, I'll add a clause to the
license which addresses this issue.

Regards,

/Samuel