Additions /Clarifications to GPL and other licenses
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Oliver Fendt
Hi Team,
sorry for another question regarding SPDX and its mapping to the world. From time to time you find additional statements from the copyright holders regarding their view about the scope of the GPL. Since these are statements from the copyright holders I regard them as relevant license information. I want to provide two examples: 1. Linux Kernel: probably all of you know the statement of Linus Torvalds: “ NOTE! This copyright does *not* cover user programs that use kernel services by normal system calls - this is merely considered normal use of the kernel, and does *not* fall under the heading of "derived work". Also note that the GPL below is copyrighted by the Free Software Foundation, but the instance of code that it refers to (the Linux kernel) is copyrighted by me and others who actually wrote it.
Also note that the only valid version of the GPL as far as the kernel is concerned is _this_ particular version of the license (ie v2, not v2.2 or v3.x or whatever), unless explicitly otherwise stated.”
Which is right in the beginning of the COPYING file.
2. Jailhouse (which is a hypervisor for Linux and it is licensed under GPL-2.0 and the following clarification)
This copyright does not cover applications or operating systems that run inside hypervisor cells, also if they use hypervisor services by normal hypercalls. This is considered normal use of the hypervisor and is not a "derived work". --------------------------------------------------------------------- GNU GENERAL PUBLIC LICENSE ….
My questions are how are the Clarifications handled in SPDX? Is the Linux Kernel licensed under GPL-2.0 or under GPL-2.0-with-clarification (I know that this currently does not exist). If the Linux Kernel is regarded to be licensed under GPL-2.0 how is the clarification to be handled in SPDX? In my opinion it must not be neglected. The same questions apply to all other such clarifications
Thanks for your patience
Ciao
Von: spdx-legal-bounces@... [mailto:spdx-legal-bounces@...]
Im Auftrag von J Lovejoy
Hi All,
In preparing the SPDX License List v1.20 for release, I noticed an oddity with the SugarCRM License, v1.1.3 http://spdx.org/licenses/SugarCRM-1.1.3
The license text here, http://www.sugarcrm.com/page/sugarcrm-public-license/en (which is where we got the license text from for the SPDX data), is slightly different than what we had for the license in the current (v1.19) version of the SPDX License List - the version at the url currently does not have the definition for “Commercial Use” and it also has some sub-sections out of numerical or alphabetical order. I did not do a complete merge-and-compare of the substantive text, as the differences were enough such that it would fail as a match with our version. Since the license version number is the same and there is no other signs of a new version or license update, I updated the .txt file for v1.20 to match the text contained on the url. I have no idea why there was a mismatch, as this was a license that has been on the SPDX License List since early iterations. If someone wants to do further research on this issue (maybe by starting with contacting SugarCRM?), that would be very much appreciated.
I’m also attaching the v1.19 .txt file of the license text for reference.
Jilayne SPDX Legal Team co-lead
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