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

Jan Engelhardt
2006-09-25T06:02:38Z

>> 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
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