Wolfgang Denk wrote at 04:42 (EDT): > the files are now licensed under GPL-2.0, i. e. the "or later" option > had to be dropped for the file as a whole, because it was not > available for the parts imported from Linux.
Files aren't copyright-magical-single-units. Nothing in the copyright statute talks about how licenses go with "files". Licenses go with works, and works can be merged, combined together, derived from, etc. to form new works which incorporate both its antecedents. Technologically, if you can "get back" to the original work and be sure that other works aren't mingled with it, then you are back to the original license. The "easy way" to do this is keep separately licensable works in different files, but that's not the only way. Thus, while splitting a file back up into parts that are GPLv2-only and GPLv2-or-later is difficult, it's not impossible, and you definitely "change the outcome by observing it" if you declare the license of a whole file to be GPLv2-only simply because some copyrightable material that was GPLv2-only was brought in. That said, I'm not a fan of this obsession to try to get "perfect information" about the license of a work, or its files, or anything else. It doesn't actually help compliance in ways that matter. -- -- bkuhn _______________________________________________ Spdx-tech mailing list Spdx-tech@lists.spdx.org https://lists.spdx.org/mailman/listinfo/spdx-tech
