On 02/21/2014 08:01 PM, Theodore Ts'o wrote: > On Fri, Feb 21, 2014 at 09:57:20AM -0800, Greg Kroah-Hartman wrote: >>> But shouldn't we at least write somewhere >>> that it has connection to spdx.org where you can find out that licenses. >> >> Why? Are these licenses so unknown that no one knows what they are? >> And, as part of the kernel-as-a-whole-work, they all resolve to GPLv2 >> anyway, and we have that license in the source tree, so nothing else >> should be needed. > > Note that not all lawyers are in agreement about this, so if this is a > driver being developed by a company, you may want to ask your > corporate counsel if they have an opinion about this. I've received > advice of the form that it's not obvious that regardless of whether or > not us *engineers* understand what all of the licensing terms mean, > what's important is whether someone who is accused of "borrowing" > GPL'ed code and dropping it in a driver for some other OS can convince > a judge whether or not it's considered "obvious" from a legal > perspective what an SPDX header means, and what is implied by an SPDX > license identifer. > > Also note that with the advent of web sites that allow people to do > web searches and turn up a singleton file via some gitweb interface, > the fact that the full license text is distributed alongside the > tarball might or might have as much legal significance as it once had. > > But of course, I'm not a lawyer, and if your company has is paying for > the development of the driver, the Golden Rule applies (he who has the > Gold, makes the Rules), and each of our respective corporate lawyers > may have different opinions about what might happen if the question > was ever to be adjudicated in court. Thanks Ted. Aren't all these points already answered by SPDX project? I believe that they should know how this should be handled properly. Thanks, Michal -- Michal Simek, Ing. (M.Eng), OpenPGP -> KeyID: FE3D1F91 w: www.monstr.eu p: +42-0-721842854 Maintainer of Linux kernel - Microblaze cpu - http://www.monstr.eu/fdt/ Maintainer of Linux kernel - Xilinx Zynq ARM architecture Microblaze U-BOOT custodian and responsible for u-boot arm zynq platform
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