My approach has always been to go direct to the copyright holder and get it in writing that you can use the code under a license which is compatible with yours. It makes things a lot simpler down the line, even if it's usually a massive hassle up front.
Rob On Fri, 17 Jan 2020, 14:44 Gregory Nutt, <spudan...@gmail.com> wrote: > I have been having an offline discussion with a business that is > interested in bringing VW's SocketCAN into NuttX. But I am puzzled by > how the licensing fits with Apache. Let me just quote: > > /I’m no legal expert but Volkswagen research dual licensed SocketCAN > as Dual BSD/GPL as shown in > //https://github.com/torvalds/linux/blob/master/net/can/af_can.c//at > line 1 and 69./ > > /Does this mean we can reuse the Linux Volkswagen research SocketCAN > code in Apache NuttX?/ > > At that reference, you see the files starts with an extra line: > > // SPDX-License-Identifier: (GPL-2.0 OR BSD-3-Clause) > /* af_can.c - Protocol family CAN core module > * (used by different CAN protocol modules) > * > * Copyright (c) 2002-2017 Volkswagen Group Electronic Research > * All rights reserved. > > and is followed by a standard 3-clause BSD license. This code is from > VW, but is part of Linux. If sourced from Linux, I presume that the > code would be GPLv3? Is that true? I really don't know. > > So I think there are three questions: (1) Can we re-use such dual > licensed software, (2) if so, de we need to get the code from a source > other than Linux, and (3) would any special grants or permissions be > required from VW? > > Greg > > >
