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Documentation: clarify driver licensing rules

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Greg has challenged some recent driver submitters on their license
choices. He was correct to do so, as the choices in these instances
did not always advance the aims of the submitters.

But, this left submitters (and the folks who help them pick licenses)
a bit confused. They have read things like
Documentation/process/license-rules.rst which says:

	individual source files can have a different license
	which is required to be compatible with the GPL-2.0

and Documentation/process/submitting-drivers.rst:

	We don't insist on any kind of exclusive GPL licensing,
	and if you wish ... you may well wish to release under
	multiple licenses.

As written, these appear a _bit_ more laissez faire than we've been in
practice lately. It sounds like we at least expect submitters to make
a well-reasoned license choice and to explain their rationale. It does
not appear that we blindly accept anything that is simply
GPLv2-compatible.

Drivers appear to be the most acute source of misunderstanding, so fix
the driver documentation first. Update it to clarify expectations.

Signed-off-by: Dave Hansen <dave.hansen@linux.intel.com>
Cc: Dan Williams <dan.j.williams@intel.com>
Cc: H. Peter Anvin <h.peter.anvin@intel.com>
Cc: Thomas Gleixner <tglx@linutronix.de>
Reviewed-by: Greg Kroah-Hartman <gregkh@linuxfoundation.org>
Link: https://lore.kernel.org/r/20200814145625.8B708079@viggo.jf.intel.com
Signed-off-by: Jonathan Corbet <corbet@lwn.net>
This commit is contained in:
Dave Hansen 2020-08-14 07:56:25 -07:00 committed by Jonathan Corbet
parent 3942ea7a10
commit 755a2f180c
1 changed files with 5 additions and 4 deletions
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9
Documentation/process/submitting-drivers.rst
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@ -60,10 +60,11 @@ What Criteria Determine Acceptance
Licensing:
The code must be released to us under the
GNU General Public License. We don't insist on any kind
of exclusive GPL licensing, and if you wish the driver
to be useful to other communities such as BSD you may well
wish to release under multiple licenses.
GNU General Public License. If you wish the driver to be
useful to other communities such as BSD you may release
under multiple licenses. If you choose to release under
licenses other than the GPL, you should include your
rationale for your license choices in your cover letter.
See accepted licenses at include/linux/module.h
Copyright: