From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S1752473Ab2KKNGF (ORCPT ); Sun, 11 Nov 2012 08:06:05 -0500 Received: from li9-11.members.linode.com ([67.18.176.11]:60489 "EHLO imap.thunk.org" rhost-flags-OK-OK-OK-OK) by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S1751085Ab2KKNGD (ORCPT ); Sun, 11 Nov 2012 08:06:03 -0500 Date: Sun, 11 Nov 2012 08:05:53 -0500 From: "Theodore Ts'o" To: James Bottomley Cc: Andy Grover , "Nicholas A. Bellinger" , target-devel , linux-scsi , linux-kernel , Marc Fleischmann , Nicholas Bellinger , "Bradley M. Kuhn" Subject: Re: scsi target, likely GPL violation Message-ID: <20121111130553.GA30943@thunk.org> Mail-Followup-To: Theodore Ts'o , James Bottomley , Andy Grover , "Nicholas A. Bellinger" , target-devel , linux-scsi , linux-kernel , Marc Fleischmann , Nicholas Bellinger , "Bradley M. Kuhn" References: <509A915B.30105@redhat.com> <1352626456.6524.46.camel@dabdike> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Disposition: inline In-Reply-To: <1352626456.6524.46.camel@dabdike> User-Agent: Mutt/1.5.21 (2010-09-15) X-SA-Exim-Connect-IP: X-SA-Exim-Mail-From: tytso@thunk.org X-SA-Exim-Scanned: No (on imap.thunk.org); SAEximRunCond expanded to false Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org List-ID: X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org On Sun, Nov 11, 2012 at 09:34:16AM +0000, James Bottomley wrote: > Anybody who does enforcement will tell you that you begin with first > hand proof of a violation. That means obtain the product and make sure > it's been modified and that a request for corresponding source fails. > In this case, since I presume Red Hat, as a RTS partner, has a bona fide > copy of the RTS OS, please verify it does indeed implement or issue the > commands which are not in the public git repository and that whoever > owns the copy makes a request for the source code. It should also be noted (although I have no idea if this is what is going on here; this is a generalized statement and not one where I have attempted to apply the facts to the law --- that requires the expertise of a lawyer, and please let's not play lawyer on LKML) that it *is* possible for the copyright owner to license the code under more than once license. Yes, once the code has been contributed to a GPL'ed project, and changes have been accepted from other people which touch said code, things get muddied --- but if someone were to keep an original copy of the code where they own 100% of all of the lines of code, and then use that in a proprietary project, that can be perfectly OK from a copyright perspective. (I say this speaking as someone who once did exactly this with the resizing code found in e2fsprogs. That work was sponsored and was made possible by the company which wrote Partition Magic, a long time ago, and the work-for-hire contract I signed with them precisely spelled out how it could be released for commercial use as well as under the GPL. As far as I know they may still be shipping resizing code for ext2 and ext3 --- but not ext4, since those changes were contributed later, under a GPL-only license.) The bottom line is that copyright licensing can get *complicated* and so before you start flinging about accusations, one would be wise to be 100% sure of the facts. You need to make sure that they have distributed lines of code which came from the *Linux* kernel, and not just from code which they may have originally contributed to the Linux kernel. Best regards, - Ted