On Mon, Oct 07, 2019 at 05:46:58PM +0000, Zavras, Alexios wrote: > Hi Greg and fellow SPDX curators 😉 > > One of our developers came to me with a question/complaint: > > ----- > I'm trying to use libtraceevent -- a library for parsing Linux ring buffer format. > Source code is located in the Linux kernel repository at https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/tree/tools/lib/traceevent > > The thing confusing me is that almost all of the files are licensed LGPL-2.1 > but the Makefiles and some .c files (some of the plugins of this library), > are licensed GPL-2.0. > ----- > > Checking the sources, I find three C files: > > tools/lib/traceevent/plugins/plugin_cfg80211.c > tools/lib/traceevent/plugins/plugin_scsi.c > tools/lib/traceevent/plugins/plugin_xen.c > > I see that the "GPL-2.0" SPDX tag was added in commit > https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/commit/?id=b24413180f5600bcb3bb70fbed5cf186b60864bd > with the clear title: > "License cleanup: add SPDX GPL-2.0 license identifier to files with no license" > (2017-11-01, by Greg). > > Shame on the original contributors for not putting license info in their files... > but I am inclined to believe that they would have been meant to be LGPL, > as the rest of the library and the other plugins. > Could it be that the "everything without a license is GPL" rule > should have exempted libtraceevent? If you wish to have it changed, please talk to the owners of those files and everyone who submitted patches to them. > More importantly, shall we update the three files to be "LGPL-2.1-only" ? Sorry, if a file did not have a license specified in it, then it fell under the default license for the kernel. thanks, greg k-h
