> At the very least 3 attorneys have reviewed this by now. 2 at SUSE > and > one at Red Hat. At least.
In the big picture that's irrelevant. An attorney's job is to protect their client or employer. > "we rather avoid any attorneys burning any ink and we prefer to just > always > require this 'dual or' language even for licenses which corporate > attorneys > have vetted as compatible" > Generally no because "You may apply license X or license Y" type statements are built upon hundreds of years of caselaw, dealt with regularly already by companies dealing with open source and in general don't need lawyers to peer at it because there is already clear policy. The last thing the kernel needs is two, then three, then five then ten different funky supposedly compatible with GPL licences where it relies upon someone saying they are compatible. That has lead to historic problems - long ago people naïvely assumed BSD 4 clause was GPL compatible. Then the lawyers realised it wasn't then you have a mess. If you proposed a chunk of code that was a long term maintenance pain in the butt Linus would tell you to take a hike. Why is it different when you are doing the same by trying to introduce weird, un-necessary licence complexity ? Alan
