Re: [RFC v2] MEDIA: Driver for ON Semi AR0521 camera sensor

[Greg KH <gregkh@linuxfoundation.org>]

On Thu, Jun 24, 2021 at 03:10:34PM +0300, Laurent Pinchart wrote:
> Hi Krzysztof,
> 
> CC'ing Greg to get his expert opinion on the topic.
> 
> On Thu, Jun 24, 2021 at 06:57:55AM +0200, Krzysztof Hałasa wrote:
> > Hi Kieran, and others,
> > 
> > Kieran Bingham <kieran.bingham@ideasonboard.com> writes:
> > 
> > >>> The work is not published under GPL.
> > >
> > > This seems like an odd thing to say when your patch explicitly contains:
> > >
> > >> +++ b/drivers/media/i2c/ar0521.c
> > >> @@ -0,0 +1,1060 @@
> > >> +// SPDX-License-Identifier: GPL-2.0
> > 
> > Such tags have meaning only in the kernel context, when signed-off etc.

Huh?  It is a statement of the license of the file itself, it is
independent of "Signed-off-by:" which is a legal agreement of a totally
different thing and is independent of license type entirely.

> > Alone, they aren't legal statements, especially when I explicitly state
> > that it's not signed-off-by me yet. Nevertheless...

Putting the above line on a file _IS_ a legal declaration that the file
is released under GPL-2.0.  It's pretty simple :)

thanks,

greg k-h