Bug 92582

Summary:	[gma500] driver: License Confusion?
Product:	DRI	Reporter:	Kenney Phillis Jr <kphillisjr>
Component:	DRM/Intel	Assignee:	Patrik Jakobsson <patrik.r.jakobsson>
Status:	CLOSED NOTABUG	QA Contact:
Severity:	enhancement
Priority:	medium
Version:	DRI git
Hardware:	All
OS:	Linux (All)
Whiteboard:
i915 platform:		i915 features:

Description Kenney Phillis Jr 2015-10-21 22:17:26 UTC

I was looking over the various DRM Drivers and noticed that this driver (GMA500) is a max of GPLv2 only and GPL With additional rights. This makes things a little bit confusing when porting drivers over to other platforms.

Example file with a more liberal License:
http://cgit.freedesktop.org/drm-intel/tree/drivers/gpu/drm/gma500/tc35876x-dsi-lvds.c

Example File that is strictly GPLv2 licensed:
http://cgit.freedesktop.org/drm-intel/tree/drivers/gpu/drm/gma500/backlight.c


I'm wondering if the licensing of this code could be made more liberal and documentation be provided on why this should be done... The main reason is to avoid re-inventing the wheel when getting DRM kernel modules over to other platforms where it is harder to include GPLv2 code in drivers.


Also as a quick note, there is several drivers to compare with that make it easier to see that it is a strongly desired trait for desktop drivers. These are the AMDGPU, AMDKFD, AST, i810, i915, Nouveu, R128, Radeon, TDFX, VIA, VGEM,  etc.

Comment 1 Patrik Jakobsson 2015-10-22 12:46:14 UTC

First of all, I'm not a lawyer and you need to seek proper legal advice from a lawyer to get an answer to this. My note below is not legal advise.

I believe the license can only be changed if all the copyright holders agree to change it but if someone picked GPLv2 for their source code they probably did so for a reason.

-Patrik

Comment 2 Kenney Phillis Jr 2015-10-22 13:36:44 UTC

I understand the Legal stuff is not as easy to fix, but it's somewhat of an Issue when I also need to make sure I can get in contact with all of the Copyright holders (Aka author). I do not know of the correct method to contact all of the Authors in this case since there is multiple files of this driver that do not include an email address to contact the author.

Comment 3 Patrik Jakobsson 2015-10-22 13:57:23 UTC

You can try this command:

git log --format='%aN <%ae>' drivers/gpu/drm/gma500/ | sort -u

Hope it helps
-Patrik

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