Our guidelines for patches [1] for Linux-wireless has been updated. One section asks Linux-wireless developers to subscribe to the patch guideline wiki page (section 2) and another which introduces the new 'Changes-licensed-under' (section 10). Here I'll cover the new 'Changes-licensed-under' tag but please refer to the link and subscribe to the page for the complete details and for further changes. -- Based on the new guidelines posted by the SFLC on ''Maintaining Permissive-Licensed Files in a GPL-Licensed Project: Guidelines for Developers'' [2], specifically section 5, we are introducing a new tag for use with patches which deal with files licensed under permissive licenses (BSD, ISC) on Linux wireless in our larger GPL project, the Linux kernel. The tag is Changes-licensed-under and can be used by developers to clarify the intended license for their patch on permissive licensed files. It is clear that not all changes qualify a patch author for Copyright but a lot of patches do qualify an author for copyright. If you want crystal clear details of what constitutes as a copyrightable change, at least within the US and the EU, you can refer to SFLC's ''Originality Requirements under U.S. and E.U. Copyright Law'' [3]. Although some developers have a practice of implying their patches for a permissive licensed file abides by the respective permissive license of the file being patched, and although some changes are obviously not copyrightable, we would like to ''err on the side of caution'', take the advice from SFLC, and introduce Changes-licensed-under in order to help the BSD family reap benefits of our contributions to permissive licensed files. The Changes-licensed-under tag should be put before the Signed-off-by tag. Since this tag is used to cover changes under permissive licenses example of possible licenses are 3-Clause-BSD, and ISC. If you are making changes to multiple permissive licensed files then please specify which license covers what files. -- For examples of using this tag please refer to the guidelines. [1] http://linuxwireless.org/en/developers/SubmittingPatches [2] http://www.softwarefreedom.org/resources/2007/gpl-non-gpl-collaboration.html [3] http://www.softwarefreedom.org/resources/2007/originality-requirements.html Luis - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-wireless" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
