On Fri, Jul 11, 2025 at 3:38 AM Greg Kroah-Hartman
<gre...@linuxfoundation.org> wrote:
>
> On Fri, Jul 11, 2025 at 12:32:57AM -0700, Christoph Hellwig wrote:
> > On Fri, Jul 11, 2025 at 09:30:31AM +0200, Greg Kroah-Hartman wrote:
> > > That's a crazy exception, and one that should probably be talked about
> > > with the FSF to determine exactly what the SPDX lines should be.
> >
> > It is called the libgcc exception and has been around forever for the
> > files in libgcc.a that a lot of these low-level kernel helpers were
> > copied from as the kernel doesn't link libgcc.
>
> Ah, so it would be something like this exception:
> https://spdx.org/licenses/GCC-exception-2.0.html
> but the wording doesn't seem to match.
>
> I'll let the license lawyers figure this out, thanks for the hint!
This one
* In addition to the permissions in the GNU General Public License, the
* Free Software Foundation gives you unlimited permission to link the
* compiled version of this file with other programs, and to distribute
* those programs without any restriction coming from the use of this
* file. (The General Public License restrictions do apply in other
* respects; for example, they cover modification of the file, and
* distribution when not linked into another program.)
is `GCC-exception-2.0`
while this one:
* As a special exception, if you link this library with files
* compiled with GCC to produce an executable, this does not cause
* the resulting executable to be covered by the GNU General Public License.
* This exception does not however invalidate any other reasons why
* the executable file might be covered by the GNU General Public License.
does not seem to be in the SPDX exception list. It is very similar to
`GNU-compiler-exception` except it specifically mentions GCC instead
of saying "a GNU compiler".
Alerting Jilayne by cc.
Also, and a question I remember wondering about a while ago, I don't
know how SPDX treats situations where, as apparently in this case,
more than one exception applies to a license grant. I don't think SPDX
syntax allows `GPL-2.0-or-later WITH GCC-exception-2.0 WITH
{some-additional-SPDX-exception}` or
`GPL-2.0-or-later WITH GCC-exception-2.0 AND {some
additional-SPDX-exception}`, i.e. I think SPDX assumes that only one
exception will ever apply in a given case, although the `AdditionRef-`
construct provides one way of dealing with this.
Richard
