Bug#323182: a bit more about miboot's legal status

[Sven Luther <sven.luther@wanadoo.fr>]

On Mon, Aug 22, 2005 at 04:08:54PM +0200, Jeremie Koenig wrote:
> On Mon, Aug 22, 2005 at 11:50:37AM +0200, Sven Luther wrote:
> > > I understand this, but was speaking about a different problem. IIRC
> > > miBoot itself uses a non-free library from Apple, in addition to being
> > > loaded by a non-free bootloader.
> > 
> > Ah, which one ? I thought it only used codewarrior 4 to build, and then used
> > probably the runtime, not sure. What is this library you are speaking about ?
> 
> I had a quick look, and found this text is at the top of the copy of the
> GPL in the Sources directory of BootX 1.2.2:
> 
> | NOTE: The included pieces called "MoreFiles", "MoreCFMPatches" and
> | other "More...." in the "lib" directory are pieces of Apple's
> | MoreFiles and MoreIsBetter packages.  Those are freely distributed
> | source packages containing various pre-made tools, by Apple.  The
> | licence on those package is quite "light" and probably conflicts with
> | the GPL. They are _NOT_ covered by BootX GPL, BootX licence covers
> | only the directories others than "lib".
> 
> However, after checking, it seems these libraries are practically not
> used to build miBoot, with the exception of the inclusion of one of
> their headers from common/elf_loader_defs.h (the code in the common/
> subdir is used both by miBoot and BootX.)
> 
> The header file in question, Optimization.h (attached, piped through
> tr '\r' '\n') is a rather trivial file, and I doubt there's any problem
> here. In the worst case it would take a minor change and a rebuild to
> get a 100% clean miBoot binary.

Header files can be reused, provided you drop all comments. (or so i was told
byt the FSF about my libparted amiga partition table support, where i copied
the partition blocks structures.

And the below file will doesn't seem to be containing any trade secret or
otherwise stuff we cannot remove in the long run.

Friendly,

Sven Luther