eCos licence

[Jonathan Larmour <jifl at jifvik dot org>]

Hi all,

I'd like to ask you for some help.... us eCos guys have now decided that 
it's probably best for everyone in the community if eCos becomes a GNU 
project. We have approached the FSF, and they are willing to do this. This 
is a very positive move for eCos as I hope you'd all agree.

However we have one stumbling block which we need Red Hat's help with: the 
current eCos documentation is licenced under the Open Publication Licence 
<http://www.opencontent.org/openpub/> (along with the OPL option "B" that 
prohibits publication in paper form without the copyright holder's 
permission). The current documentation is a mixture of stuff that is 
copyrighted by individual eCos maintainers, which we can deal with no 
problem, but also copyright Red Hat.

Unfortunately the FSF do not find this documentation licence acceptable, 
and so we would be very grateful if Red Hat could do one of two things: 
either declare that RH is willing to licence it under the Free 
Documentation Licence <http://www.fsf.org/copyleft/fdl.html>, or, even 
better, assign copyright for the documentation to the FSF. Obviously 
assigning to the FSF is something Red Hat is pretty familiar with! But 
either option is fine.

As I'm sure you agree, right now there's no real value to Red Hat in the 
current documentation licence as it now includes work by others, and so 
Red Hat would now be bound by the same OPL restrictions too!

So we'd be grateful if you could help with this. Removing this stumbling 
block would mean that eCos and RedBoot both have a secure and bright 
future with the FSF.

Thanks in advance!

Jifl
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