Re: The GPL: No shelter for the Linux kernel?

Re: The GPL: No shelter for the Linux kernel?

[Petr Baudis]

  (Quoting in full for the git@ people.)

Dear diary, on Sat, Sep 23, 2006 at 08:00:23PM CEST, I got a letter
where Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org> said that...
> On Sat, 23 Sep 2006, Jan Engelhardt wrote:
> > 
> > Now that you raise it: I think developers can already have done that 
> > if they wish - properly name author and conditions who may possibly 
> > change the license to what. Not that I have seen such code yet, but you 
> > never know.
> 
> Side note: in "git", we kind of discussed this. And because the project 
> was started when the whole GPL version discussion was already in bloom, 
> the git project has a note at top of the COPYING file that says:
> 
>  Note that the only valid version of the GPL as far as this project
>  is concerned is _this_ particular version of the license (ie v2, not
>  v2.2 or v3.x or whatever), unless explicitly otherwise stated.
> 
>  HOWEVER, in order to allow a migration to GPLv3 if that seems like
>  a good idea, I also ask that people involved with the project make
>  their preferences known. In particular, if you trust me to make that
>  decision, you might note so in your copyright message, ie something
>  like
> 
>         This file is licensed under the GPL v2, or a later version
>         at the discretion of Linus.
> 
>   might avoid issues. But we can also just decide to synchronize and
>   contact all copyright holders on record if/when the occasion arises.
> 
> but note how it's still at the discretion of the actual developers (ie 
> when you add a file, you can either not specify any extensions, in which 
> case it's "GPLv2 only", or you can specify "GPLv2 or any later", or you 
> can specify the "GPLv2 or any later at the discretion of Linus Torvalds".
> 
> The silly thing, of course, is that I'm not even the maintainer any more, 
> and that Junio has done a kick-ass job of maintaining the thing, and is 
> definitely the main author by now. So the whole "discretion of Linus" is a 
> bit insane.
> 
> [ Although exactly _because_ Junio has been such a great maintainer, I'd 
>   bow down to whatever decision he does, so my "discretion" would be to 
>   let him decide, if he wanted to. At some point, you have to trust some 
>   people, and just let go - if they do more than you do, they damn well 
>   have more rights than you do too. "Maintainership has its privileges" ]
> 
> Anyway, I suspect the git language was a mistake. We should just have done 
> what the kernel did - make the version number be clear and fixed, so that 
> people don't even have to worry about exactly what conditions might cause 
> a relicensing to happen.

  Actually, this didn't catch on very well anyway, I guess because most
people just know it's GPLv2 and don't even bother to peek at COPYING, we
are a bit sloppy about copyright notices and most of them don't mention
licence at all (if there are any in the file at all), and adding
explicit copyright notices to mails isn't too popular either.

	$ git grep 'discretion'
	COPYING:        at the discretion of Linus.
	git-annotate.perl:# at the discretion of Linus Torvalds.
	git-relink.perl:# Later versions of the GPL at the discretion of Linus Torvalds
	git-request-pull.sh:# at the discretion of Linus Torvalds.

and I've found no patches with such special assignment.

  I think people don't really want to bother with thinking too much
about licences at all unless absolutely necessary, they just want to do
the fun part (coding). :-)

-- 
				Petr "Pasky" Baudis
Stuff: http://pasky.or.cz/
#!/bin/perl -sp0777i<X+d*lMLa^*lN%0]dsXx++lMlN/dsM0<j]dsj
$/=unpack('H*',$_);$_=`echo 16dio\U$k"SK$/SM$n\EsN0p[lN*1
lK[d2%Sa2/d0$^Ixp"|dc`;s/\W//g;$_=pack('H*',/((..)*)$/)

Re: The GPL: No shelter for the Linux kernel?

[Jan Engelhardt]

>> Side note: in "git", we kind of discussed this. And because the project 
>> was started when the whole GPL version discussion was already in bloom, 
>> the git project has a note at top of the COPYING file that says:
>> 
>>  Note that the only valid version of the GPL as far as this project
>>  is concerned is _this_ particular version of the license (ie v2, not
>>  v2.2 or v3.x or whatever), unless explicitly otherwise stated.
>> 
>>  HOWEVER, in order to allow a migration to GPLv3 if that seems like
>>  a good idea, I also ask that people involved with the project make
>>  their preferences known. In particular, if you trust me to make that
>>  decision, you might note so in your copyright message, ie something
>>  like
>> 
>>         This file is licensed under the GPL v2, or a later version
>>         at the discretion of Linus.
>> 
>
>  Actually, this didn't catch on very well anyway, I guess because most
>people just know it's GPLv2 and don't even bother to peek at COPYING, we
>are a bit sloppy about copyright notices and most of them don't mention
>licence at all (if there are any in the file at all), and adding
>explicit copyright notices to mails isn't too popular either.

Would every file that does not contain an explicit license (this 
excludes MODULE_LICENSE) falls under COPYING?

>	$ git grep 'discretion'
>	COPYING:        at the discretion of Linus.
>	git-annotate.perl:# at the discretion of Linus Torvalds.
>	git-relink.perl:# Later versions of the GPL at the discretion of Linus Torvalds
>	git-request-pull.sh:# at the discretion of Linus Torvalds.
>
>and I've found no patches with such special assignment.


Jan Engelhardt
-- 

Re: The GPL: No shelter for the Linux kernel?

[Linus Torvalds]

On Sun, 24 Sep 2006, Jan Engelhardt wrote:
> 
> Would every file that does not contain an explicit license (this 
> excludes MODULE_LICENSE) falls under COPYING?

Basically, yes. There's nothing to really say that you need to state your 
copyright license in every individual file, especially if those files are 
only ever distributed as a whole, together with other things (which souce 
code obviously is - you generally cannot even use an individual *.c file 
without the infrastructure it was written for).

If a file doesn't have a license mentioned, it doesn't mean that it's 
"free for all" or not copyrighted, it just means that you need to find out 
what the license is some other way (and if you can't find out, you 
shouldn't be copying that file ;)

Of course, for clarity, a lot of projects end up adding at least a minimal 
copyright header license everywhere, just to cover their *sses. It's not 
required, but maybe it avoids some confusion, especially if that file is 
later copied into some other project with other basic rules (but if you 
do that, you really _should_ have added the information at that point!).

Me personally, I prefer to not see huge boiler-plate licenses at the top 
of the file, so that every time I open a new file I just see the dang 
license that has nothing to do with why I'm opening it. So I tend to do a 
fairly minimal thing ("Copyright (C) Linus Torvalds 2006" or similar) but 
sometimes I drop even that (ie I personally feel silly adding a copyright 
message to a header file, so I usually don't - and sometimes I just 
forget about it in real source files too)..

Others are more anal^H^H^H^Hcareful, and tend to add a few lines to tell 
what the license is, the ubiqutous "all rights reserved" (which is just 
idiocy), and a blinking gif advertisement for their company. Oh, and the 
"no warranty" clause. And an aphorism or two.

In other words, I don't think there are any real rules. Different people 
and different projects have more or less different rules. If you expect to 
collect treble damages in the US, you might want to add a copyright notice 
just about everywhere, "just in case", and to "show you really care".

IANAL, of course.

			Linus

Re: The GPL: No shelter for the Linux kernel?

[Jan Engelhardt]

>> Would every file that does not contain an explicit license (this 
>> excludes MODULE_LICENSE) falls under COPYING?
>
>[...]
>If a file doesn't have a license mentioned, it doesn't mean that it's 
>"free for all" or not copyrighted, it just means that you need to find out 
>what the license is some other way (and if you can't find out, you 
>shouldn't be copying that file ;)
>
>Of course, for clarity, a lot of projects end up adding at least a minimal 
>copyright header license everywhere, just to cover their *sses. It's not 
>required, but maybe it avoids some confusion, especially if that file is 
>later copied into some other project with other basic rules (but if you 
>do that, you really _should_ have added the information at that point!).
>[...]

Though I strongly agree with you, some GNU folks (such as 
savannah.nongnu.org) seem to explicitly require it, even for files 
that do not make up a single program (i.e. like coreutils/ls.c).



Jan Engelhardt
-- 

Re: The GPL: No shelter for the Linux kernel?

[Linus Torvalds]

On Mon, 25 Sep 2006, Jan Engelhardt wrote:
> 
> Though I strongly agree with you, some GNU folks (such as 
> savannah.nongnu.org) seem to explicitly require it, even for files 
> that do not make up a single program (i.e. like coreutils/ls.c).

Each project obviously has its own rules. The kernel, in many ways, these 
days does something even stronger, in the sense that we now ask not that 
every file be marked, but each and every change be signed-off-on. It's 
more than a copyright issue, of course (it started out motivated by the 
worries of tracking codeflow, but I think one reason it has worked so well 
is that it's become useful for so many other things).

So lots of projects have their specific rules. I don't think the "add 
notice to every file" is wrong per se, I just think it's impractical: not 
only does it get unwieldly with all those messages at the top, usually an 
open source project ends up being a mix of lots of different people that 
own rights in it, and in many ways it's thus better to track at a change 
level rather than a file level if you do tracking.

But exactly because it doesn't have any real legal rules, the rules are 
from other sources, and boil down mainly to just per-project "coding 
style" issues.

		Linus