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

Jerry Van Baren
2009-06-30T14:16:26Z

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