From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S264993AbUETF5e (ORCPT ); Thu, 20 May 2004 01:57:34 -0400 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org id S264997AbUETF5e (ORCPT ); Thu, 20 May 2004 01:57:34 -0400 Received: from dsl092-053-140.phl1.dsl.speakeasy.net ([66.92.53.140]:34946 "EHLO grelber.thyrsus.com") by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S264993AbUETF5c (ORCPT ); Thu, 20 May 2004 01:57:32 -0400 From: Rob Landley To: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Subject: 2.6 kernel header licensing. Date: Thu, 20 May 2004 00:56:40 -0500 User-Agent: KMail/1.5.4 Cc: torvalds@osdl.org, Mariusz Mazur MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Content-Disposition: inline Message-Id: <200405200056.40444.rob@landley.net> Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org I'm using Mariusz Mazur's kernel headers package to compile my C library against, and I asked him what the license on his package was. He said it's derived from the 2.6 kernel, so the license is whatever's on the 2.6 kernel. That's the GPL. This means that even though these are cleaned up kernel headers with kernel internal stuff stripped out, and designed to compile a userspace C library against, there's a license conflict if I use the resulting C library to compile anything but GPL software. Technically, if I use them to compile BSD software with the advertising clause, I can't distribute the result. The three P's (Perl, Python, and PHP) are right out. Now I'm fairly certain this was not the intent. And I could probably make a case in court that the intent of header files is to provide an external API to compile against, so the userspace portions of the kernel headers are pretty much by definition an external interface boundary that the GPL's terms won't cross. (They define the boundary; that's what they're for.) But I'd really rather just get this resolved politely now. Would anybody on linux-kernel like to venture an opinion about whether the license on Mariusz's Mazur's kernel headers package could be changed to LGPL instead of GPL? (Since that's what the LGPL is, in point of fact, for. And for years the glibc people have been grabbing kernel headers and blithely using them to create an LGPL product with nobody complaining, and in fact before uclibc you couldn't have a functional linux kernel sysem without it, so there's a de facto license of some sort anyway that it would be nice to make explicit.) The kernel headers in question can be found here: http://ep09.pld-linux.org/~mmazur/linux-libc-headers/ Linus? Anybody? -- www.linucon.org: Linux Expo and Science Fiction Convention October 8-10, 2004 in Austin Texas. (I'm the con chair.)