On 2/11/19 11:27 PM, Ben Finney wrote: > Martin Steigerwald <martin.steigerw...@proact.de> writes: > >> Well the file has in its header: >> >> /* Fast hashing routine for a long. >> (C) 2002 William Lee Irwin III, IBM */ >> >> /* >> * Knuth recommends primes in approximately golden ratio to the maximum >> * integer representable by a machine word for multiplicative hashing. >> * Chuck Lever verified the effectiveness of this technique: >> * http://www.citi.umich.edu/techreports/reports/citi-tr-00-1.pdf >> * >> * These primes are chosen to be bit-sparse, that is operations on >> * them can use shifts and additions instead of multiplications for >> * machines where multiplications are slow. >> */ >> >> It has been quite a while ago. I bet back then I did not regard this >> as license information since it does not specify a license. Thus I >> assumed it to be GPL-2 as the other files which have no license boiler >> plate. I.e.: Check file is it has different license, if not, then >> assume it has license as specified in COPYING. >> >> Not specifying a license can however also mean in this context that it >> has no license as the file contains copyright information from another >> author. > > If a work (even one file) “has no license”, that means no special > permissions are granted and normal copyright applies: All rights > reserved, i.e. not redistributable. So, no license is grounds to > consider a work non-free and non-redistributable. > > If, on the other hand, the file is to be free software, there would need > to be a clear grant of some free software license to that work. > > Given the confusion over this file, I would consider it a significant > risk to just assume we have GPLv2 permissions without being told that > explicitly by the copyright holder. Rather, the reason we are seeking a > clearly-granted free license for this one file, is because we are trying > to replace a probably non-free file with the same code in it. > > It seems we need to keep looking, and in the meantime assume we have no > free license in this file.
FWIW, fio.c includes the following mention: * The license below covers all files distributed with fio unless otherwise * noted in the file itself. followed by the GPL v2 license. I'll go through and add SPDX headers to everything to avoid wasting anymore time on this nonsense. -- Jens Axboe
