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

[Greg KH]

On Wed, Jan 29, 2020 at 01:41:34PM -0600, Pierre-Louis Bossart wrote:
> 
> > > > 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.

Don't create a new module, unless your lawyers say you have to do so.
That way lies madness...

Why is this code dual-licensed in the first place anyway?  It only will
work on Linux, right?

Anyway, I thought Intel had stopped doing this, just changing the
license on the one file should be sufficient for now.  But again, I am
not your lawyer, go talk to yours before doing anything.

thanks,

greg k-h