UAPI syscall exception interpretation

UAPI syscall exception interpretation

[Muhammad Ali]

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Consider a file: ftpclient.c
Only include is: #include <sys/socket.h>
Then a few hundred lines of personal code.
Then compiler/linker take in ftpcliebt.c and produce a.out (statically or dynamically linked, consider both cases if it makes a licensing difference)

Does the Linux-syscall-note say that a.out can ALL be under any license of your choice?

Or do you have to note that your binary is under License X and also includes code which is under license GPL-2.0-WITH-Linux-syscall-note?

Thanks
-ma


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Re: UAPI syscall exception interpretation

[Greg KH]

On Wed, May 11, 2022 at 09:19:42PM +0000, Muhammad Ali wrote:
> Consider a file: ftpclient.c
> Only include is: #include <sys/socket.h>
> Then a few hundred lines of personal code.
> Then compiler/linker take in ftpcliebt.c and produce a.out (statically or dynamically linked, consider both cases if it makes a licensing difference)
> 
> Does the Linux-syscall-note say that a.out can ALL be under any license of your choice?
> 
> Or do you have to note that your binary is under License X and also includes code which is under license GPL-2.0-WITH-Linux-syscall-note?

For legal issues, please contact a lawyer.  You wouldn't ask a random
internet mailing list full of programmers questions about dental care,
right?  :)

Good luck!

greg k-h

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Re: UAPI syscall exception interpretation

[Muhammad Ali]

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From: Greg KH
Sent: May 12, 2022 12:03 AM
To: Muhammad Ali <M.ALI023@hotmail.com>
Cc: Kernelnewbies@kernelnewbies.org <Kernelnewbies@kernelnewbies.org>
Subject: Re: UAPI syscall exception interpretation

>On Wed, May 11, 2022 at 09:19:42PM +0000, >Muhammad Ali wrote:
>> Consider a file: ftpclient.c
>> Only include is: #include <sys/socket.h>
>> Then a few hundred lines of personal code.
>> Then compiler/linker take in ftpcliebt.c and >produce a.out (statically or dynamically linked, >consider both cases if it makes a licensing >difference)
>>
>> Does the Linux-syscall-note say that a.out can >ALL be under any license of your choice?
>>
>> Or do you have to note that your binary is under >License X and also includes code which is under >license GPL-2.0-WITH-Linux-syscall-note?

>For legal issues, please contact a lawyer.  You >wouldn't ask a random
>internet mailing list full of programmers questions >about dental care,
>right?  :)
>
>Good luck!
>
>greg k-h

Happy to see you responded Greg,  since you have marked this issue as low priority since 2020, see https://lkml.org/lkml/2020/2/23/105

If we could finally get some clarity or examples to illustrate the exception and license, 2 years later, then that would be very nice, because I am not the only one who is thinking that the current syscall exception text and license.rst are not giving a clear interpretation as to when the GPL applies and on what code it applies. What do I tell the lawyer? “Here’s some conflicting licensing guide and license text and Greg said, on the mailing list, that things will be ‘made obvious’ but nothing has changed so just provide me with what you think”? Shouldn’t I be saying that sentence to the kernel maintainers, instead?

Thanks, Greg
-ma

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Re: UAPI syscall exception interpretation

[Greg KH]

On Thu, May 12, 2022 at 11:21:03PM +0000, Muhammad Ali wrote:
> From: Greg KH
> Sent: May 12, 2022 12:03 AM
> To: Muhammad Ali <M.ALI023@hotmail.com>
> Cc: Kernelnewbies@kernelnewbies.org <Kernelnewbies@kernelnewbies.org>
> Subject: Re: UAPI syscall exception interpretation
> 
> >On Wed, May 11, 2022 at 09:19:42PM +0000, >Muhammad Ali wrote:
> >> Consider a file: ftpclient.c
> >> Only include is: #include <sys/socket.h>
> >> Then a few hundred lines of personal code.
> >> Then compiler/linker take in ftpcliebt.c and >produce a.out (statically or dynamically linked, >consider both cases if it makes a licensing >difference)
> >>
> >> Does the Linux-syscall-note say that a.out can >ALL be under any license of your choice?
> >>
> >> Or do you have to note that your binary is under >License X and also includes code which is under >license GPL-2.0-WITH-Linux-syscall-note?
> 
> >For legal issues, please contact a lawyer.  You >wouldn't ask a random
> >internet mailing list full of programmers questions >about dental care,
> >right?  :)
> >
> >Good luck!
> >
> >greg k-h
> 
> Happy to see you responded Greg,  since you have marked this issue as low priority since 2020, see https://lkml.org/lkml/2020/2/23/105

Other things happened in 2020 that pushed this to the back of the list.

> If we could finally get some clarity or examples to illustrate the exception and license, 2 years later, then that would be very nice, because I am not the only one who is thinking that the current syscall exception text and license.rst are not giving a clear interpretation as to when the GPL applies and on what code it applies. What do I tell the lawyer? “Here’s some conflicting licensing guide and license text and Greg said, on the mailing list, that things will be ‘made obvious’ but nothing has changed so just provide me with what you think”? Shouldn’t I be saying that sentence to the kernel maintainers, instead?

If you have a lawyer that has issues with the current wording and you
need help with that, please let me know and I can put them in contact
with lawyers who can help them understand the issues involved.

thanks,

greg k-h

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Re: UAPI syscall exception interpretation

[Muhammad Ali]

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From: Greg KH
Sent: May 13, 2022 1:36 AM
To: Muhammad Ali <m.ali023@hotmail.com>
Cc: Kernelnewbies@kernelnewbies.org <Kernelnewbies@kernelnewbies.org>
Subject: Re: UAPI syscall exception interpretation

On Thu, May 12, 2022 at 11:21:03PM +0000, Muhammad Ali wrote:
> From: Greg KH
> Sent: May 12, 2022 12:03 AM
> To: Muhammad Ali <M.ALI023@hotmail.com>
> Cc: Kernelnewbies@kernelnewbies.org <Kernelnewbies@kernelnewbies.org>
> Subject: Re: UAPI syscall exception interpretation
>
> >On Wed, May 11, 2022 at 09:19:42PM +0000, >Muhammad Ali wrote:
> >> Consider a file: ftpclient.c
> >> Only include is: #include <sys/socket.h>
> >> Then a few hundred lines of personal code.
> >> Then compiler/linker take in ftpcliebt.c and >produce a.out (statically or dynamically linked, >consider both cases if it makes a licensing >difference)
> >>
> >> Does the Linux-syscall-note say that a.out can >ALL be under any license of your choice?
> >>
> >> Or do you have to note that your binary is under >License X and also includes code which is under >license GPL-2.0-WITH-Linux-syscall-note?
>
> >For legal issues, please contact a lawyer.  You >wouldn't ask a random
> >internet mailing list full of programmers questions >about dental care,
> >right?  :)
> >
> >Good luck!
> >
> >greg k-h
>
> Happy to see you responded Greg,  since you have marked this issue as low priority since 2020, see https://lkml.org/lkml/2020/2/23/105

Other things happened in 2020 that pushed this to the back of the list.

> If we could finally get some clarity or examples to illustrate the exception and license, 2 years later, then that would be very nice, because I am not the only one who is thinking that the current syscall exception text and license.rst are not giving a clear interpretation as to when the GPL applies and on what code it applies. What do I tell the lawyer? “Here’s some conflicting licensing guide and license text and Greg said, on the mailing list, that things will be ‘made obvious’ but nothing has changed so just provide me with what you think”? Shouldn’t I be saying that sentence to the kernel maintainers, instead?

If you have a lawyer that has issues with the current wording and you
need help with that, please let me know and I can put them in contact
with lawyers who can help them understand the issues involved.

thanks,

greg k-h
——————————

Thank you, Greg.
I am starting to understand things much better.
The issue from 2020 is taken care of and is now marked closed, correct?

Thank you for your time,
-ma

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Re: UAPI syscall exception interpretation

[Valdis Klētnieks]

On Wed, 11 May 2022 21:19:42 -0000, Muhammad Ali said:

> Does the Linux-syscall-note say that a.out can ALL be under any license of
> your choice?

> Or do you have to note that your binary is under License X and also includes
> code which is under license GPL-2.0-WITH-Linux-syscall-note?

Not a lawyer, but... :)

For any program that's big and complex enough that you aren't embarrassed to
distribute it, the kernel isn't going to be your problem, because down in the
details, your code is probably not issuing syscall() itself, but is letting
glibc or musl or whatever the cool kids are using this week do the syscall.

So what you need to worry about is the license on glibc or whatever... and also
the license on any *other* libraries that you use (you're not going to write
your own JSON parser or other stuff like that, are you?).

In particular, understand the difference between GPL and LGPL licenses.  There's
also a lot of other userspace licenses in play - as an example on my laptop, I have:

[~] for i in `rpm -qa`; do rpm -qi $i | grep ^License; done | sort | uniq -c > /tmp/licenses
[~] wc /tmp/licenses
  304  2397 14912 /tmp/licenses
[~] more /tmp/licenses
      3 License     : (ASL 2.0 or MIT) and (BSD and MIT)
      1 License     : (Artistic 2.0 or ASL 2.0) and MIT
      1 License     : (Copyright only) and (Artistic or GPL+)
      1 License     : (Copyright only) and (GPL+ or Artistic)
      2 License     : (FTL or GPLv2+) and BSD and MIT and Public Domain and zlib with acknowledgement
      1 License     : (GPL+ or Artistic) and (GPLv2+ or Artistic) and MIT
      1 License     : (GPL+ or Artistic) and Artistic 2.0 and UCD
      3 License     : (GPL+ or Artistic) and BSD
      1 License     : (GPL+ or Artistic) and BSD and HSRL and MIT and UCD and Public domain
      1 License     : (GPL+ or Artistic) and CC0
      1 License     : (GPL+ or Artistic) and CC0 and Public Domain
      1 License     : (GPL+ or Artistic) and FSFAP
(and so on for another 300-ish lines..

And as Greg noted, if the answer actually matters, hire a lawyer who is experienced
in  intellectual property law.

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