Hi Jason, On Sat, Mar 10, 2018 at 7:15 PM, Jason Gunthorpe <jgg@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > On Sat, Mar 10, 2018 at 05:16:04PM -0800, Greg Kroah-Hartman wrote: >> On Sat, Mar 10, 2018 at 03:01:53PM -0700, Jason Gunthorpe wrote: >> > On Sat, Mar 10, 2018 at 12:06:36PM -0800, Greg Kroah-Hartman wrote: >> > > On Thu, Mar 08, 2018 at 10:55:28AM -0700, Jason Gunthorpe wrote: >> > > > Hi Greg & Co, >> > > > >> > > > A question has come up in the infiniband/rdma space about what SPDX >> > > > license headers to use for some of our files. >> > > >> > > Which is a huge hint you should probably make it a lot simpler :) >> > >> > This license text was written in around 2005 and has been copied into >> > around 659 files in the kernel. It looks like there are > 15 companies >> > listed as copyright holders, some now defunct. >> >> Any hint as to who wrote it in the very first place? And why was it >> copied everywhere? What drove that decision? > > Around 2005 an industry association called "OpenIB" was founded to > consolidate and upstream into Linux what is today drivers/infiniband. > > That group of companies mutually agreed to use a "dual GPL and BSD > license" scheme and the membership agreement obligated the member > companies to use such a license. I don't know if OpenIB ever > officially published an actual license text or not, anything from that > era seems gone. > > As I understand it: At that point in history many of the member > companies were new to this Open Source thing and had propriety systems > they wanted to incorporate this software into. (eg Solaris, AIX, > FreeBSD, etc have all benefited from this work) So this very > permissive BSD license option was selected to give them the most > rights to the code they contributed. > > Somehow when drivers/infiniband was first merged it contained this > license text. I don't know where Roland Drier got the text from. > > From there all the member companies copy and pasted that text, and it > become the cannonical text. > > After that it appeared to spread into other parts of the kernel, eg > crypto, scsi, net, etc all now have files that use it. I can't imagine > this was any sort of well thought out act, probably just the same > developers 'cargo cult' copying what they had always done. > > If that wasn't confusing enough, some of the userspace side of the > subsystem uses a different variant of the OpenIB.org BSD license that > includes the FreeBSD warranty, not the MIT warranty. I have no idea why > that is, or where that came from either, I only know about it because > I audited the licenses of the userspace side and noticed this > difference. Let me recheck in details drivers/infiniband -- Cordially Philippe Ombredanne -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-rdma" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
