Re: The GPL: No shelter for the Linux kernel?

From: Jan Engelhardt <jengelh@linux01.gwdg.de>
Date: Sep 25, 2006, 05:59 UTC
Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.4.61.0609250757070.18552@yvahk01.tjqt.qr>
In-Reply-To: <Pine.LNX.4.64.0609240923331.4388@g5.osdl.org>

Show 15 quoted lines

>> Would every file that does not contain an explicit license (this 
>> excludes MODULE_LICENSE) falls under COPYING?
>
>[...]
>If a file doesn't have a license mentioned, it doesn't mean that it's 
>"free for all" or not copyrighted, it just means that you need to find out 
>what the license is some other way (and if you can't find out, you 
>shouldn't be copying that file ;)
>
>Of course, for clarity, a lot of projects end up adding at least a minimal 
>copyright header license everywhere, just to cover their *sses. It's not 
>required, but maybe it avoids some confusion, especially if that file is 
>later copied into some other project with other basic rules (but if you 
>do that, you really _should_ have added the information at that point!).
>[...]

Though I strongly agree with you, some GNU folks (such as savannah.nongnu.org) seem to explicitly require it, even for files that do not make up a single program (i.e. like coreutils/ls.c).

Jan Engelhardt