Re: Copyrights and licenses

[Daniel Kiper]

Hi Eric,

First of all, I am not lawyer. So, please do not treat anything below as
a legal advice.

On Sun, Apr 12, 2020 at 10:38:36AM -0400, Eric McCorkle wrote:
> As part of my work on FreeBSD (re)-integration, I would like to pull in
> some code from the FreeBSD loader for GELI volumes.  Specifically, there
> were some changes a while back that did things like store keys and check
> new volumes against the cached keys.  I also noticed when I looked at
> the current GELI code in grub that it doesn't seem to be zeroing out
> keys properly when done with them.
>
> This of course introduces a licensing question.  The FreeBSD loader code
> is under the 2-clause BSD license.  I noticed that the current GELI code
> seems to incorporate a 2-clause BSD banner; is it therefore acceptable
> to simply update the banner?

Please take a look at [1], [2], [3] and [4]. AIUI this means that you
are allowed to release your new combined GELI code under the GPLv3.
Though I would suggest to confirm that with legal folks.

Daniel

[1] https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html.en
[2] https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html
[3] https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#WhatIsCompatible
[4] https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#WhatDoesCompatMean