Not legal advice, but this should be fairly clear because they did the leg work of doing the spdx headers (which we should keep if we bring this in). We can treat the code either the GPLv2 or the BSD-3 license, this actually came up recently because the licensing around can-utils was being clarified which I had made a small contribution to and they asked for acks on some license headers.
https://github.com/linux-can/can-utils/pull/143 Note that there is a mix and not all of the spdx headers include the BSD license option. How this relates to the move to the Apache 2.0 I'm not sure on. Probably can email Apache Legal. --Brennan On Fri, Jan 17, 2020, 6:44 AM 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 > > >
