Re: [Fwd: Re: [gNewSense-users] Copyright, but no license: Free or not?]

[Matthew Flaschen]

Matthew J. Fisher wrote:
> Here's a message that I received from Richard Stallman last Thursday. He
> is still concerned about resolving the "copyright but no license" issue.
> 
> Richard M Stallman <address@hidden> wrote:
> > The page
> http://wiki.gnewsense.org/Kernel/DocumentingYourWork?from=Main.DocumentingYourWorkKernel
>> says that people should record that a file has no license.

I don't understand this worry.  Since when has it been required (as
opposed to a good idea) to put a license notice in each file?  Linux as
a whole is licensed under GPLv2 and accordingly has a copy of GPLv2 in
the root of the tree.  Just like any other project, patches and new
files become covered by this license when they come into the tree.  If
the developer didn't want to put their code under GPLv2, they would have
specified another license explicitly (and perhaps not be able to legally
distribute the combination) or not submitted code at all.

Any source in the kernel tree should thus be considered GPLv2 unless
explicitly stated otherwise.  In my opinion, the focus of auditing
should be looking for "source" that is really binary firmware.

Matt Flaschen