[rbmj]

OK, finally got around to contacting Wind River. Confirmation Number 319, whatever that means.

Hello,

I am a student on FIRST (For the Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology) Robotics Team 612. I am working on developing an alternative toolchain targeting vxWorks in order to allow teams to use a newer version of GCC, primarily in order to have a native linux build for FRC and to get new features (including C++11 support) not present in GCC 3.4.4 that is currently provided to FRC Teams.

Currently, in order to build the necessary runtime libraries, I am using the system headers from [1], which National Instruments distributes but contains (as far as I can tell) mostly Wind River Intellectual Property.

In order for the headers to be accepted, it is necessary to incorporate a few patches. These patches are relatively minor and are only intended to allow the headers to be accepted by the newer version of GCC and increase interoperability and standards compliance. However, the headers contain the following notice:

/*
* Copyright (c) 1984-2005 Wind River Systems, Inc.
*
* The right to copy, distribute or otherwise make use of this software
* may be licensed only pursuant to the terms of an applicable Wind River
* license agreement. No license to Wind River intellectual property rights
* is granted herein. All rights not licensed by Wind River are reserved
* by Wind River.
*/

Which very clearly states that posession of the file does not confer any Intellectual Property rights to users. Thus, modification and redistribution of such code is illegal. I made my modifications under the Wind River FRC License Agreement (namely, "THIS OBJECT CODE LICENSE AND DISTRIBUTION AGREEMENT"), section 4, and therefore freely assign any copyright to any modifications I made to the system headers to Wind River.

Additionally, in order to share my progress with the community, I wish to redistribute the toolchain I have developed. As a necessary part of its functioning, such a toolchain requires the system headers for the target Operating System (in this case vxWorks). This does not contain any implementation code but is rather only the declarations to allow code to operate inside of vxWorks. In order to share my work with the FIRST community then, it is necessary for me to distribute the vxWorks system headers.

Thus, I request that Wind River release the system headers (and the headers alone - I do not request a license to any implementation code) for vxWorks under an open source license (such as FIRST's BSD-Style license) in order to facilitate the exchange of knowledge and tools related to vxWorks within the FIRST community. Should Wind River be unwilling to do so, I request that Wind River license allow modification and redistribution of the system headers to vxWorks for non-commercial purposes, such as the FIRST Robotics Competition and related activities by team members and affiliated adults. Again, this would not confer any rights on the actual proprietary implementation of vxWorks, but only the declarations needed to interface with such code.

If you wish to see the patches I have made (they are minimal), I am more than willing to supply them and an explanation as to why they are necessary; they are, after all, your intellectual property under the current license agreement!

Sincerely,

Robert 'Blair' Mason, Jr.
Member and Former 'CEO'
Chantilly Robotics
FIRST Robotics Competition Team 612

[1] ftp://ftp.ni.com/pub/devzone/tut/upd...s63gccdist.zip