[U-Boot] U-book and GPLv3? (fwd)

[Jerry Van Baren <gerald.vanbaren@ge.com>]

Richard Stallman wrote:
> Files without a copyright notice and a license notice are a legal problem.
> 
> Legally, every file is copyrighted.  If there's no copyright notice,
> that just means it gives no info about who the copyright holder is.
> 
> The lack of a license notice is a problem.  If the file is trivial,
> just a few lines, maybe it does not matter.  But otherwise, if there
> is no license, that means it doesn't give people permission to copy or
> change or redistribute the file.  Perhaps even the U-boot developers
> don't have this permission.

Agreed.  I was just doing a simplistic grep looking for "fingerprints" 
of GPL and BSD licenses and I did not find them in 436 files.  I looked 
at a couple of files to confirm that my greping wasn't over simplistic 
(it wasn't in the cases I checked).  I also did not see any licenses 
other than GPL or BSD, but I did not look at many of the files in 
question so it is possible that there are other licenses out there, but 
probably not.

I did *not* analyze the files for complexity and appropriateness of 
copyright/license information in the file.  That should be done 
regardless of the results of the GPLv3 debate and the files that should 
have copyright/license information in their headers need to be either 
fixed or replaced.

Best regards,
gvb