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The primary purpose of my intense auditing has
been to improve lbmk's coding style and fix bugs
but there is a secondary purpose: know precisely
who owns what, because I want to re-license as
much as possible of lbmk under *MIT*, instead of
the current GNU licensing. MIT is vastly superior,
because it grants *actual* freedom to the user,
permits *sublicensing* and it is vastly more
compatible with other GPL combinations; for
example, MIT license is compatible with GPL2-only
whereas lbmk's current mix of GPLv3-or-later and
GPLv3-only is legally incompatible with GPLv2-only.
Re-licensing under MIT will most likely result in
more contributions to Libreboot's build system in
the future, especially as it will attract a lot
more commercial interest. Contrary to the popular
arguments, copyleft is a liability to the free
software movement and results in less code being
written; in practise, permissively licensed code
gets more public contributions, including from
commercial entities, even if companies can
theoretically make something proprietary out of
it (in practise, anyone inclined can just use the
upstream and proprietary forks almost always die).
Copyleft propaganda is fundamentally flawed. See:
<https://unixsheikh.com/articles/the-problems-with-the-gpl.html>
Anyway, I've been doing a combination of:
* Seeking permission from other copyright holders,
for re-licensing
* Deleting, or moving, other contributions; for
example, splitting certain contributions into
separate files so that originally modified files
become unencumbered. This latter solution is a
result of *code cleanup* arising from the audit.
For Ferass's contributions, I opted to seek
*permission*, and permission was denied. In full compliance
with this legal imperative, I'm acting accordingly; this
commit removes all of Ferass's changes that converted lbmk
to posix shell scripts, thus removing his copyright on the
affected files, bypassing his authority entirely. Therefore,
lbmk is largely now bash-dependent. In practise, nobody is
going to use anything other than a GNU system to build
Libreboot, because many projects that Libreboot makes use
of rely heavily on GNU; for example, coreboot's build
system makes heavy use of GNU-specific extensions in *GNU
Make*, and likely contains many bashisms. Of course,
Libreboot also compiles GNU GRUB.
I would much rather have MIT-licensed Bash scripts
than GPL-licensed posix SCL scripts.
This reverts the changes from Ferass El Hafidi,
for the following commits, with some exceptions:
* 7f5dfebf7d37c56d9c7993aaa17c59070cb5aec9
* f787044642236917c9c4dbcaa48a6b0648097db0
Exception:
download/mrc not reverted, because that was
already a fork of an existing script under
coreboot's build system, and their script was
GPLv2. i cannot/will not re-license this file
(ergo,
7f5dfebf7d37c56d9c7993aaa17c59070cb5aec9
change remains intact, on this file)
resources/scripts/build/boot/roms_helper, these changes
have been kept:
* 7e6691e9 - Add ARMv7 and AArch64 support
* dec2d720 - add myself in the build/roms_helper script
(added 2021 copyright for the change below)
* b7405656 - Workaround for grub's slow boot
^ these changes will be re-factored, splitting them
out of the file into a new file. This will be done in
a future lbmk revision. (in some cases, it makes sense
to keep a change but split it, allowing the main file to
be re-licensed without the change in it)
This is part of a much larger series of
licensing audits. It's likely that lbmk will
be posix-compliant (in its shell scripts)
again some day, because I'm planning to rewrite
most of these scripts (the ones modified in this
patch), and many of them (e.g. individual download
scripts) are subject to future deletion in a planned
overhaul of the download logic for third party
projects.
In addition: these changes are being kept (no attempt
to re-license them will be made):
* cff081c6 - Fix grub's slow boot (1 year, 5 months ago) <Vitali64>
* 4c851889 - Add macbook*1 16mb configs (1 year, 6 months ago) <Vitali64>
Ferass's work that remains will be split into dedicated
files containing them, where feasible.
In the case of grub.cfg (for GNU GRUB), I don't care
because it's a script for an engine (GRUB shell) that's
under GPL anyway, so who really cares about MIT license.
Signed-off-by: Leah Rowe <leah@libreboot.org>
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