Messages in this thread | | | From | Rob Herring <> | Date | Tue, 5 May 2015 11:41:15 -0500 | Subject | Re: Device Tree Blob (DTB) licence |
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On Tue, May 5, 2015 at 5:05 AM, Yann Droneaud <ydroneaud@opteya.com> wrote: > Hi, > > I believe Device Tree Blob (.dtb file) built from kernel's Device Tree > Sources (.dts, which #include .dtsi, which #include .h) using Device > Tree Compiler (dtc) are covered by GNU General Public Licence v2 > (GPLv2), but cannot find any reference.
By default yes, but we've been steering people to dual license them GPL/BSD.
> As most .dtsi in arch/arm/boot/dts/ are covered by GPLv2, and, > as most .h in include/dt-bindings/ are also covered by GPLv2, > the source code is likely covered by GPLv2. > > Then this source code is translated in a different language (flattened > device tree), so the resulting translation is also likely covered by > GPLv2. > > So, when I'm proposed to download a .dtb file from a random vendor, > can I require to get the associated source code ?
I believe so yes. However, you already have the "source" for the most part. Just run "dtc -I dtb -O dts <dtb file>". You loose the preprocessing and include structure though (not necessarily a bad thing IMO).
Then the question is what is the license on that generated dts!
> Anyway, for a .dtb file generated from kernel sources, it's rather > painful to look after all .dts, .dtsi, .h, to find what kind of > licences are applicables, as some are covered by BSD, dual licensed > (any combination of X11, MIT, BSD, GPLv2).
I imagine the includes cause some licensing discrepancies if you dug into it.
Rob
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