SPDX: Appletalk FW license in the kernel

From: Prarit Bhargava <prarit@redhat.com>
To: Dave Miller <davem@redhat.com>,
	Vitaly Kuznetsov <vkuznets@redhat.com>,
	jschlst@samba.org, linux-kernel <linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org>
Subject: SPDX: Appletalk FW license in the kernel
Date: Fri, 15 Sep 2023 09:39:05 -0400	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <6100798b-ab1d-262a-fd5b-435d6dfc4a53@redhat.com> (raw)

Hey davem,

There has been a request in Fedora to confirm that the License field of 
all the RPMs is correct [1].  We've made some recent changes to the 
Fedora kernel [2] to correct the License field [3].  This License field 
reflects the license of the *source* code and does not reflect the 
license of the final binaries.

During our investigation we discovered two files in the kernel

	drivers/net/appletalk/cops_ffdrv.h
	drivers/net/appletalk/cops_ltdrv.h

which from their descriptions imply that the code contained is not GPL, 
and seem to be in conflict of the kernel's overall license GPLv2.

To be clear, I am not asking for their removal, however, I do think a 
better license should be issued for these files.  The files were 
trivially modified in 2006. It could be that the code in question is now 
unused and it is just easier to remove them.

Is there anyone you know of that we could approach to determine a proper 
SPDX License for these files?

P.

[1] https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/legal/update-existing-packages/

[2] https://gitlab.com/cki-project/kernel-ark/-/merge_requests/2648

[3] License: ((GPL-2.0-only WITH Linux-syscall-note) OR BSD-2-Clause) 
AND ((GPL-2.0-only WITH Linux-syscall-note) OR BSD-3-Clause) AND 
((GPL-2.0-only WITH Linux-syscall-note) OR CDDL-1.0) AND ((GPL-2.0-only 
WITH Linux-syscall-note) OR Linux-OpenIB) AND ((GPL-2.0-only WITH 
Linux-syscall-note) OR MIT) AND ((GPL-2.0-or-later WITH 
Linux-syscall-note) OR BSD-3-Clause) AND ((GPL-2.0-or-later WITH 
Linux-syscall-note) OR MIT) AND BSD-2-Clause AND BSD-3-Clause AND 
BSD-3-Clause-Clear AND GFDL-1.1-no-invariants-or-later AND 
GPL-1.0-or-later AND (GPL-1.0-or-later OR BSD-3-Clause) AND 
(GPL-1.0-or-later WITH Linux-syscall-note) AND GPL-2.0-only AND 
(GPL-2.0-only OR Apache-2.0) AND (GPL-2.0-only OR BSD-2-Clause) AND 
(GPL-2.0-only OR BSD-3-Clause) AND (GPL-2.0-only OR CDDL-1.0) AND 
(GPL-2.0-only OR GFDL-1.1-no-invariants-or-later) AND (GPL-2.0-only OR 
GFDL-1.2-no-invariants-only) AND (GPL-2.0-only WITH Linux-syscall-note) 
AND GPL-2.0-or-later AND (GPL-2.0-or-later OR BSD-2-Clause) AND 
(GPL-2.0-or-later OR BSD-3-Clause) AND (GPL-2.0-or-later OR CC-BY-4.0) 
AND (GPL-2.0-or-later WITH GCC-exception-2.0) AND (GPL-2.0-or-later WITH 
Linux-syscall-note) AND ISC AND LGPL-2.0-or-later AND (LGPL-2.0-or-later 
OR BSD-2-Clause) AND (LGPL-2.0-or-later WITH Linux-syscall-note) AND 
LGPL-2.1-only AND (LGPL-2.1-only OR BSD-2-Clause) AND (LGPL-2.1-only 
WITH Linux-syscall-note) AND LGPL-2.1-or-later AND (LGPL-2.1-or-later 
WITH Linux-syscall-note) AND (Linux-OpenIB OR GPL-2.0-only) AND 
(Linux-OpenIB OR GPL-2.0-only OR BSD-2-Clause) AND 
Linux-man-pages-copyleft AND MIT AND (MIT OR Apache-2.0) AND (MIT OR 
GPL-2.0-only) AND (MIT OR GPL-2.0-or-later) AND (MIT OR LGPL-2.1-only) 
AND (MPL-1.1 OR GPL-2.0-only) AND (X11 OR GPL-2.0-only) AND (X11 OR 
GPL-2.0-or-later) AND Zlib AND (copyleft-next-0.3.1 OR GPL-2.0-or-later)