SPDX: Appletalk FW license in the kernel

From: Prarit Bhargava
Date: Fri Sep 15 2023 - 09:40:01 EST


Hey davem,

There has been a request in Fedora to confirm that the License field of all the RPMs is correct [1]. We've made some recent changes to the Fedora kernel [2] to correct the License field [3]. This License field reflects the license of the *source* code and does not reflect the license of the final binaries.

During our investigation we discovered two files in the kernel

drivers/net/appletalk/cops_ffdrv.h
drivers/net/appletalk/cops_ltdrv.h

which from their descriptions imply that the code contained is not GPL, and seem to be in conflict of the kernel's overall license GPLv2.

To be clear, I am not asking for their removal, however, I do think a better license should be issued for these files. The files were trivially modified in 2006. It could be that the code in question is now unused and it is just easier to remove them.

Is there anyone you know of that we could approach to determine a proper SPDX License for these files?

P.

[1] https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/legal/update-existing-packages/

[2] https://gitlab.com/cki-project/kernel-ark/-/merge_requests/2648

[3] License: ((GPL-2.0-only WITH Linux-syscall-note) OR BSD-2-Clause) AND ((GPL-2.0-only WITH Linux-syscall-note) OR BSD-3-Clause) AND ((GPL-2.0-only WITH Linux-syscall-note) OR CDDL-1.0) AND ((GPL-2.0-only WITH Linux-syscall-note) OR Linux-OpenIB) AND ((GPL-2.0-only WITH Linux-syscall-note) OR MIT) AND ((GPL-2.0-or-later WITH Linux-syscall-note) OR BSD-3-Clause) AND ((GPL-2.0-or-later WITH Linux-syscall-note) OR MIT) AND BSD-2-Clause AND BSD-3-Clause AND BSD-3-Clause-Clear AND GFDL-1.1-no-invariants-or-later AND GPL-1.0-or-later AND (GPL-1.0-or-later OR BSD-3-Clause) AND (GPL-1.0-or-later WITH Linux-syscall-note) AND GPL-2.0-only AND (GPL-2.0-only OR Apache-2.0) AND (GPL-2.0-only OR BSD-2-Clause) AND (GPL-2.0-only OR BSD-3-Clause) AND (GPL-2.0-only OR CDDL-1.0) AND (GPL-2.0-only OR GFDL-1.1-no-invariants-or-later) AND (GPL-2.0-only OR GFDL-1.2-no-invariants-only) AND (GPL-2.0-only WITH Linux-syscall-note) AND GPL-2.0-or-later AND (GPL-2.0-or-later OR BSD-2-Clause) AND (GPL-2.0-or-later OR BSD-3-Clause) AND (GPL-2.0-or-later OR CC-BY-4.0) AND (GPL-2.0-or-later WITH GCC-exception-2.0) AND (GPL-2.0-or-later WITH Linux-syscall-note) AND ISC AND LGPL-2.0-or-later AND (LGPL-2.0-or-later OR BSD-2-Clause) AND (LGPL-2.0-or-later WITH Linux-syscall-note) AND LGPL-2.1-only AND (LGPL-2.1-only OR BSD-2-Clause) AND (LGPL-2.1-only WITH Linux-syscall-note) AND LGPL-2.1-or-later AND (LGPL-2.1-or-later WITH Linux-syscall-note) AND (Linux-OpenIB OR GPL-2.0-only) AND (Linux-OpenIB OR GPL-2.0-only OR BSD-2-Clause) AND Linux-man-pages-copyleft AND MIT AND (MIT OR Apache-2.0) AND (MIT OR GPL-2.0-only) AND (MIT OR GPL-2.0-or-later) AND (MIT OR LGPL-2.1-only) AND (MPL-1.1 OR GPL-2.0-only) AND (X11 OR GPL-2.0-only) AND (X11 OR GPL-2.0-or-later) AND Zlib AND (copyleft-next-0.3.1 OR GPL-2.0-or-later)