On 9/1/16 12:27 PM, Greg KH wrote: > On Thu, Sep 01, 2016 at 12:10:52PM -0400, Miles Fidelman wrote: >> I know it's released under the GPL, but, for the life of me, I can't >> find any statement of who is actually granting the licenses (i.e., who >> holds the copyright), and I can't seem to find any kind of copyright >> assignment statement that contributors are required to execute. >> >> So, how does this all work? > Also, please read, Documentation/SubmittingPatches, and > Documentation/development_process/ that might help you out here with the > more non-legal aspects of your questions. Quite helpful. Thank you. And related precisely to the LEGAL aspects of my query. Specifically: "Code is contributed to the Linux kernel under a number of licenses, but all code must be compatible with version 2 of the GNU General Public License (GPLv2), which is the license covering the kernel distribution as a whole. In practice, that means that all code contributions are covered either by GPLv2 (with, optionally, language allowing distribution under later versions of the GPL) or the three-clause BSD license. Any contributions which are not covered by a compatible license will not be accepted into the kernel. Copyright assignments are not required (or requested) for code contributed to the kernel. All code merged into the mainline kernel retains its original ownership; as a result, the kernel now has thousands of owners. One implication of this ownership structure is that any attempt to change the licensing of the kernel is doomed to almost certain failure. There are few practical scenarios where the agreement of all copyright holders could be obtained (or their code removed from the kernel). So, in particular, there is no prospect of a migration to version 3 of the GPL in the foreseeable future." and, "- The legal issues around the distribution of proprietary kernel modules are cloudy at best; quite a few kernel copyright holders believe that most binary-only modules are derived products of the kernel and that, as a result, their distribution is a violation of the GNU General Public license (about which more will be said below). Your author is not a lawyer, and nothing in this document can possibly be considered to be legal advice. The true legal status of closed-source modules can only be determined by the courts. But the uncertainty which haunts those modules is there regardless." -- In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice, there is. .... Yogi Berra _______________________________________________ Kernelnewbies mailing list Kernelnewbies@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx https://lists.kernelnewbies.org/mailman/listinfo/kernelnewbies
