libtraceevent license

libtraceevent license

[Zavras, Alexios]

Hi Greg and fellow SPDX curators 😉

One of our developers came to me with a question/complaint:

-----
I'm trying to use libtraceevent -- a library for parsing Linux ring buffer format.
Source code is located in the Linux kernel repository at https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/tree/tools/lib/traceevent 

The thing confusing me is that almost all of the files are licensed LGPL-2.1
but the Makefiles and some .c files (some of the plugins of this library),
are licensed GPL-2.0.
-----

Checking the sources, I find three C files:

tools/lib/traceevent/plugins/plugin_cfg80211.c
tools/lib/traceevent/plugins/plugin_scsi.c
tools/lib/traceevent/plugins/plugin_xen.c

I see that the "GPL-2.0" SPDX tag was added in commit
https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/commit/?id=b24413180f5600bcb3bb70fbed5cf186b60864bd
with the clear title:
"License cleanup: add SPDX GPL-2.0 license identifier to files with no license"
(2017-11-01, by Greg).

Shame on the original contributors for not putting license info in their files...
but I am inclined to believe that they would have been meant to be LGPL,
as the rest of the library and the other plugins.
Could it be that the "everything without a license is GPL" rule
should have exempted libtraceevent?

More importantly, shall we update the three files to be "LGPL-2.1-only" ?

-- zvr

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Re: libtraceevent license

[Greg KH]

On Mon, Oct 07, 2019 at 05:46:58PM +0000, Zavras, Alexios wrote:
> Hi Greg and fellow SPDX curators 😉
> 
> One of our developers came to me with a question/complaint:
> 
> -----
> I'm trying to use libtraceevent -- a library for parsing Linux ring buffer format.
> Source code is located in the Linux kernel repository at https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/tree/tools/lib/traceevent 
> 
> The thing confusing me is that almost all of the files are licensed LGPL-2.1
> but the Makefiles and some .c files (some of the plugins of this library),
> are licensed GPL-2.0.
> -----
> 
> Checking the sources, I find three C files:
> 
> tools/lib/traceevent/plugins/plugin_cfg80211.c
> tools/lib/traceevent/plugins/plugin_scsi.c
> tools/lib/traceevent/plugins/plugin_xen.c
> 
> I see that the "GPL-2.0" SPDX tag was added in commit
> https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/commit/?id=b24413180f5600bcb3bb70fbed5cf186b60864bd
> with the clear title:
> "License cleanup: add SPDX GPL-2.0 license identifier to files with no license"
> (2017-11-01, by Greg).
> 
> Shame on the original contributors for not putting license info in their files...
> but I am inclined to believe that they would have been meant to be LGPL,
> as the rest of the library and the other plugins.
> Could it be that the "everything without a license is GPL" rule
> should have exempted libtraceevent?

If you wish to have it changed, please talk to the owners of those files
and everyone who submitted patches to them.

> More importantly, shall we update the three files to be "LGPL-2.1-only" ?

Sorry, if a file did not have a license specified in it, then it fell
under the default license for the kernel.

thanks,

greg k-h