On Wed, 22 May 2019, Richard Fontana wrote:
> On Wed, May 22, 2019 at 8:05 AM Thomas Gleixner <tglx@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> > neither [alan] [cox] [nor] [cymrunet]
> > [ltd] admit liability nor provide warranty for any of this software
> > this material is provided as is and at no charge
>
> Since some of these disclaimer statements are getting scrutinized,
> this one is also notable though it is more general than the other ones
> that have been called out. I think we should decide what to do about
> variously-worded warranty/liability disclaimer statements in general
> and consider this variety along with others. I assume SPDX previously
> never considered the problem of how to deal with license notices with
> various nonstandard disclaimer statements other than implicitly
> treating the ones in the GNU notice as conveying nothing more than
> what's already in the GPL/LGPL license texts.
>
> For the time being I am trying to call attention to anything that
> seems even slightly interestingly different from what's in the GNU
> notice ("WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
> MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE").
Right. The patcher keeps them around:
- * 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.
- *
* Neither Alan Cox nor CymruNet Ltd. admit liability nor provide
* warranty for any of this software. This material is provided
* "AS-IS" and at no charge.
But yes, the question is whether this is yet another license
variant^Wabomination.
Assumed that combining these magic disclaimers with the GPL text forms a
unique license then we probably (did not validate) double the number of
licenses in the kernel. We already have 80+ without those.
Thanks,
tglx
