From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S1755324Ab2DGAwc (ORCPT ); Fri, 6 Apr 2012 20:52:32 -0400 Received: from mail-iy0-f174.google.com ([209.85.210.174]:48630 "EHLO mail-iy0-f174.google.com" rhost-flags-OK-OK-OK-OK) by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S1755078Ab2DGAwN (ORCPT ); Fri, 6 Apr 2012 20:52:13 -0400 MIME-Version: 1.0 In-Reply-To: References: <1333757482-16204-1-git-send-email-mcgrof@frijolero.org> From: "Luis R. Rodriguez" Date: Fri, 6 Apr 2012 17:51:51 -0700 X-Google-Sender-Auth: Aj0r_l0fktMHLOISyBOHCNDwfzo Message-ID: Subject: Re: [PATCH] module: Clarify GPL-Compatible is OK To: Linus Torvalds Cc: rusty@rustcorp.com.au, linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org, Keith Packard , Ralf Baechle , David Woodhouse , Stephen Hemminger , "John W. Linville" , Greg Kroah-Hartman Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8 Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org List-ID: X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org On Fri, Apr 6, 2012 at 5:36 PM, Linus Torvalds wrote: > On Fri, Apr 6, 2012 at 5:11 PM, Luis R. Rodriguez wrote: >> -MODULE_LICENSE("Dual BSD/GPL"); >> +MODULE_LICENSE("GPL-Compatible"); > > I really don't see the point. > > This makes things *worse*. > > "Dual BSD/GPL" actually tells you something: it tells you that you can > take that code, and use it in a BSD project. > > In contrast "GPL-compatible" tells you nothing at all. > > So you are actually removing real information, and just making things > harder for everybody. Its a good point that we are not declaring the exact license used for software, and while that is useful the "Dual BSD/GPL" tag is misleading. As I see it there are four options: 1) Use this as a technical artifact only to ensure symbols we declare EXPORT_SYMBOL_GPL() will only be used by GPL-Compatible modules. Also use the GPL-Compatible tag as annotated by this patch to annotate this. Then add another tag to specific the exact license, which is not anything of an artifact but just informational to the binary module but also software developer reviewing code. This last part would clarify the exact license. 2) We keep extending the list of MODULE_LICENSE() with all the different GPL-Compatible licenses we are comfortable with. This list is pretty outdated already. This means we keep chugging along and adding more licenses. 3) Leave things as is, and clarify this. I think this confuses developers though, and for sharing purposes it would be nice. Hence the patch. You have no idea how many e-mails I have had to deal with to address this. People really think this is impossible. In fact we had a flamewar eons ago because a few of us didn't know this was possible to help the BSDs. Not just developers, I think there are even maintainers not too sure about this. 4) Use the patch and leave it to the person who wants to extract code to figure out the exact module license. Option 1) seems to me to provide the best alternative but leaves open then the question of whether or not we need to keep tabs of accepted GPLv2 compatible licenses we accept or leave this as informational. Option 4) handles the technical artifacts we care about but gives some homework to consumers. Please let me know if anyone can think of better alternatives. Luis