On Mon, May 23 2022 at 11:56, Thomas Gleixner wrote:
> Further digging revealed that there are two variants of historic
> unspecific "boilerplate":
>
> 1) "This file is subject to the terms and conditions of the GNU General
> Public License. See the file "COPYING" in the main directory of
> this archive for more details."
>
> 2) "This file is released under the GPL."
>
> #1 had a first appearance in v1.1.45 (released August 15, 1994)
>
> This one was not added by you. It was added by Ralf Bächle in
> preparation for MIPS support when he split up the toplevel Makefile
> and include/asm files. The resulting arch/i386/Makefile with this got
> copied into Makefiles all over the place (39 as of today). The total
> spread of this boilerplate is 1046 instances.
>
> #2 surfaced in 2.3.35 (released Decemeber 19, 1999)
>
> This is definitely your invention.
>
> But it did not become so popular. Only 93 instances today.
The first unspecific GPL reference in the kernel was:
* Public License (GPL)
Courtesy to Ted Tso in 0.97.6 (September 20, 1992)
It survived until today in serial.h and the uapi split offs, but got
no traction.
followed by a networking update in 0.99.10 (June 7, 1993):
/* This file is distributed under the GPL.
It's not entirely clear who added this, but there is are hints:
Donald Becker, Russ Nelson and Crynwr Software (Nelsons company)
This also added the file net/inet/LICENSE.8390 with the following
content:
Code in this directory written at the IDA Supercomputing Research Center
carries the following copyright and license.
Copyright 1993 United States Government as represented by the
Director, National Security Agency. This software may be used
and distributed according to the terms of the GNU Public License,
incorporated herein by reference.
In addition to the disclaimers in the GPL, SRC expressly disclaims any
and all warranties, expressed or implied, concerning the enclosed software.
This software was developed at SRC for use in internal research, and the
intent in sharing this software is to promote the productive interchange
of ideas throughout the research community. All software is furnished
on an "as-is" basis. No further updates to this software should be
expected. Although updates may occur, no commitment exists.
This file is still in the source tree: drivers/net/LICENSE.SRC
Though there is nothing referencing this file at all.
That file came from Donald with the 8390 driver:
"8390.c:v0.99-10 5/28/93 for 0.99.6+ Donald Becker (becker@xxxxxxxxx)\n"
Funny enough the current version string in 8390.c is:
"8390.c:v1.10cvs 9/23/94 Donald Becker (becker@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx)\n";
I doubt that any of those email addresses is still valid.
Oh well....
Thanks,
tglx
