[alsa-devel] Question about the correct license to use with debugfs in SOF

[Pierre-Louis Bossart]

>>> Currently, it is dual licensed with GPLv2.0 and BSD. But Pierre brought
>> up
>>> a concern about this conflicting with all the exports in the file being
>>> GPLv2.0. Should this be fixed to change the license to GPLv2.0 only?
>>> Appreciate your help in this regard.
>>
>> Why ask a developer a legal question, don't you all have a whole huge
>> legal department who knows all of this type of thing really really well?
>>
>> Would you ask a programmer a medical question?
>>
>> That being said, think about trying to justify the existance of a BSD
>> licensed file trying to access gpl-only symbols, why in the world would
>> this even be a question?  Why have it dual licensed at all when I was
>> told that Intel was NOT going to do this anymore for any kernel code?
>>
> Thanks for your patience and clarification.
> We discovered the discrepancy while vetting the licenses in the files
> again. Something we should be a bit more careful about moving forward.
> Sorry for the trouble!

Indeed it's not our intention to use dual-licensing for debugfs at all.

Please treat this thread as a desire to be transparent with maintainers 
about a miss rather than an evil scheme to work around GPL.

Ranjani and I discovered the issue only a couple of hours ago while 
moving code around. I don't have any explanation for this other than a 
review oversight where we saw the EXPORT_SYMBOL_GPL and not the SPDX 
line. It's a mistake, not a feature.

I just checked the history and all the changes were made by Intel, 
except for your change "ASoC: SOF: no need to check return value of 
debugfs_create functions", and 2 minor other fixes for memory leaks.

We'll immediately change the license to GPLv2 only, move the code in a 
dedicated module that's GPLv2 only, and scan the rest of the 
Intel-contributed parts to make sure we don't have this mistake in other 
places.

Thanks
-Pierre