Re: [gNewSense-users] BSD code

[Peter and Jesse]

On Sun, 2008-27-04 at 13:50 +0200, Sam Geeraerts wrote:
> Peter and Jesse wrote:
> > On Fri, 2008-25-04 at 20:01 +0200, Sam Geeraerts wrote:
> >> Peter and Jesse wrote:
> >>>> The copyright notice says "The Regents of the University of California" 
> >>>> (plural) so there might be more than one person you can contact?
> >>>>
> >>>> If we could find who put the update-statement in there we could ask that 
> >>>> person. The best thing I could find was 
> >>>> http://lxr.linux.no/linux-old+v2.4.0/drivers/net/bsd_comp.c, which shows 
> >>>> that the update was introduced in 2.4.0. Does anybody know of an easy 
> >>>> web front end to the kernel revision logs so that we can find the author 
> >>>> of the change?
> >>> Ooh, you're right. I contacted Paul Mackerras (paulus), but looking at
> >>> the old kernels, his time-stamped name is there before the license was
> >>> changed. Regarding the Regents of the University of California, they
> >>> would have been the copyright holders in the original license, so I
> >>> wouldn't think they would have anything to do with the problematic
> >>> introduction. However, if folks want, I can try to get a hold of the
> >>> appropriate people at the U of C.
> >>>  Peter
> >>>
> The bugs are about the code having no license. The initial license was 
> original BSD. That license was changed to modified BSD automatically for 
> all code belonging to Berkeley. If the code hasn't changed significantly 
> so that there are no other copyright holders then these files were also 
> subject to that change. Else, the other copyright holders had to also 
> agree on that, I think, which they probably did.
> 
> Assuming that the update statement is supposed to clarify this and that 
> the person who put it in had all the information, it would be good to 
> contact him to ask about the meaning of it and possibly change it. If 
> that person can't be found then kernel-devel is probably the next best 
> thing. If you can't get an answer from them, then we'll just have to 
> assume modified BSD and leave it at that.

Sam, Would you be willing to contact kernel-devel? You seem to have a
better idea of the issues at hand than I do. If so, another thing you
might want to mention is that both of the files have
MODULE_LICENSE("Dual BSD/GPL") in them. I'm not sure how that fits in.
 Peter