Re: WTF? Re: [PATCH] License cleanup: add SPDX GPL-2.0 license identifier to files with no license

From: Alan Cox <gnomes@lxorguk.ukuu.org.uk>
To: "Luis R. Rodriguez" <mcgrof@kernel.org>
Cc: Greg Kroah-Hartman <gregkh@linuxfoundation.org>,
	Christoph Hellwig <hch@infradead.org>,
	"Theodore Ts'o" <tytso@mit.edu>,
	"Darrick J. Wong" <darrick.wong@oracle.com>,
	Eric Sandeen <sandeen@redhat.com>,
	xfs <linux-xfs@vger.kernel.org>,
	Richard Fontana <fontana@sharpeleven.org>,
	linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org
Subject: Re: WTF? Re: [PATCH] License cleanup: add SPDX GPL-2.0 license identifier to files with no license
Date: Wed, 8 Nov 2017 17:19:38 +0000	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <20171108171938.7df66c65@alans-desktop> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <20171107214259.GC16026@wotan.suse.de>

>     By default all files without license information are under the default
>     license of the kernel, which is GPL version 2.

Which is factually incorrect.

They are under a licence that is at least as permissive as GPL v2.
However they may be under a more permissive licence and as you are not
the rightsholder you don't have the right to relicence them mroe
restrictvely.

For example

I find a reference piece of code whose author says it is 'too trivial to
copyright'. I (not the author0 place that code in the kernel. The licence
on that code is still 'too trivial to copyright' (by estoppel). That's
GPL 2 compliant but it is *NOT* GPL.

As anyone can contribute third party code that is GPL compliant
legitimately you can't assume any unmarked code is GPL, merely 'at least
GPL'.

Alan