Hello, I have today read the patch by Hans de Goede to add a dts file for the "Banana Pi" development board (see http://lists.infradead.org/pipermail/linux-arm-kernel/2014-July/276339.html) and have stumbled over the license declaration at the beginning: > +/* > + * Copyright 2014 Hans de Goede <hdegoede@xxxxxxxxxx> > + * > + * The code contained herein is licensed under the GNU General Public > + * License. You may obtain a copy of the GNU General Public License > + * Version 2 or later at the following locations: > + * > + * http://www.opensource.org/licenses/gpl-license.html > + * http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.html > + */ The phrase "The code contained herein is licensed under the GNU General Public License" does not make explicitly clear under which version(s) of the GPL the code can be used. From the following "You may obtain a copy of the GNU General Public License Version 2 or later at the following locations [...]" one can deduce that the intention is most probably to license the code unter GPL2+, but from a legal point of view this information should be an explicit part of the license statement itself, as strictly formally speaking the latter statement does only inform the reader where he can find the text of GPL2 and later GPL versions, but does not expressly apply them to the code. This is of course a rather formalistic view and may well be seen as beancounting, but I have seen too many cases where formal license ambiguities have led to problems years later, so I proposed to Hans to change the wording in his patch to something more explicit, similar to the dts files for other arm platforms. A phrasing like used in the GPL appendix ("This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version") would avoid any ambiguity. Hans agreed that the current phrasing is not ideal and should probably be changed to something unabiguous but pointed out that a similar wording is used in all the other dts files for Allwinner SOCs (arch/arm/boot/dts/sun?i-a*.dts) and proposed to refer the issue to you as the Allwinner platform maintainer (with the linux-arm-kernel and devicetree lists in CC). Regards, Karsten -- Gem. Par. 28 Abs. 4 Bundesdatenschutzgesetz widerspreche ich der Nutzung sowie der Weitergabe meiner personenbezogenen Daten für Zwecke der Werbung sowie der Markt- oder Meinungsforschung. -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe devicetree" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
