On 07/31/2015 10:34 AM, Christoph Lameter wrote:
> On Wed, 8 Jul 2015, Christoph Hellwig wrote:
>
>> On Wed, Jul 08, 2015 at 03:33:03PM -0400, Doug Ledford wrote:
>>> I am not a lawyer, but this has been explained to me on numerous
>>> occasions, so I relay the layman's interpretation here:
>>>
>>> No, you don't always need everyone's approval. There are contributions
>>> that are not legally copyright worthy.
>>
>> There are. But for an open source project trying to deal with slippery
>> slot is not worth it. Just get an ACK from everyone to be on the safe
>> side and show that you act in good faith.
>
> Note that there are numerous contributions in the IB subsystem from folks
> not in the OFA. Those certainly have the expectation that their work was
> under the GPLv2 and not BSD.
If they made the contribution to a file that listed a dual license at
the top of the file (or a dual license file in the directory covering
all of the files in that directory) and they didn't bother to check the
license before contributing and then expected it to be under the GPL
only and not a dual GPL/BSD, then that is their problem for not paying
attention to the copyright of the files in question. Expectation only
matters if there isn't a clearly spelled out copyright. When a clearly
spelled out copyright exists, it certainly trumps inattentive expectations.
--
Doug Ledford <dledford@xxxxxxxxxx>
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