Re: [B.A.T.M.A.N.] [PATCH 8/9] batman-adv: Change batman_adv.h license to MIT

Andrew Lunn
2017-11-23T15:43:29Z

On Thu, Nov 23, 2017 at 03:36:04PM +0100, Sven Eckelmann wrote:
> Hi Andrew,
>
> On Sonntag, 19. November 2017 15:05:16 CET Sven Eckelmann wrote:
> > The ISC license is considered as not recommended in "Linux kernel licensing
> > rules". It should only be used for existing code or for importing code from
> > a different project with that license.
> >
> > But the kernel still has the similar sounding MIT/Expat license under the
> > preferred licenses. Switching to this license for this relatively new file
> > should therefore allow batman-adv to better follow the new licensing rules.
> >
> > Signed-off-by: Sven Eckelmann <sven@narfation.org>
> > ---
> > I would ask for Acked-by from following persons
>
> What I wanted to say here: "I would like to get an Acked-by reply from
> following persons" (thanks to Simon, Matthias and Antonio for the fast
> response).

Hi Sven

Sorry, was not paying close enough attentions to notice you wanted my
feedback.

I just looked at Linus's current master branch:

~/linux/include/uapi$ grep -hr SPDX * | sort | uniq -c
14 /* SPDX-License-Identifier: GPL-1.0+ WITH Linux-syscall-note */
541 /* SPDX-License-Identifier: GPL-2.0 WITH Linux-syscall-note */
113 /* SPDX-License-Identifier: GPL-2.0+ WITH Linux-syscall-note */
1 /* SPDX-License-Identifier: ((GPL-2.0 WITH Linux-syscall-note) AND MIT) */
21 /* SPDX-License-Identifier: ((GPL-2.0 WITH Linux-syscall-note) OR BSD-2-Clause) */
17 /* SPDX-License-Identifier: ((GPL-2.0 WITH Linux-syscall-note) OR BSD-3-Clause) */
4 /* SPDX-License-Identifier: ((GPL-2.0+ WITH Linux-syscall-note) OR BSD-3-Clause) */
3 /* SPDX-License-Identifier: ((GPL-2.0 WITH Linux-syscall-note) OR MIT) */
3 /* SPDX-License-Identifier: LGPL-2.0+ WITH Linux-syscall-note */
3 /* SPDX-License-Identifier: LGPL-2.1 WITH Linux-syscall-note */
15 /* SPDX-License-Identifier: LGPL-2.1+ WITH Linux-syscall-note */

We are in the region of "Lies, damn lies, and statistics", but
everything with an SPDX tag has some form of GPL/LGPL. Now, adding
SPDX tags is a new activity, and adding the GPLs tags have been done
first, since they are easier to do. So it could be there are a lot of
UAPI header files which are not {L}GPL. Also, given this small sample,
it seems BSD is more popular over MIT.

I understand the reasons for ISC to MIT, so

Acked-by: Andrew Lunn <andrew@lunn.ch>

However, i wounder if GPL-2.0 WITH Linux-syscall-note OR one of the
BSD variants would be more consistent with the rest of the kernel?

Andrew