[U-Boot] common/cmd_nand.c license terms

[Scott Wood]

On 07/28/2013 07:31:00 AM, Wolfgang Denk wrote:
> Dear Scott,
> 
> with commit ea533c2 "cmd_nand: some infrastructure fixes and
> refactoring" (Mon Aug 02, 2010), you added the following license
> header to common/cmd_nand.c :
> 
> + * Copyright 2010 Freescale Semiconductor
> + * The portions of this file whose copyright is held by Freescale  
> and which
> + * are not considered a derived work of GPL v2-only code may be  
> distributed
> + * and/or modified under the terms of the GNU General Public License  
> as
> + * published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the
> + * License, or (at your option) any later version.
> 
> Looking at this commit, it is totally unclear to me which parts of the
> newly added code you could be referring to with your "which are not
> considered a derived work of GPL v2-only code".
> 
> Your addition makes the legal situation of the whole file pretty much
> indeterminable.  Could you please be so kind and explain what exactly
> your intention was, and what exactly yuou were referring to?

The license of the whole file is GPLv2 only.  The intent was to  
preemptively grant relicensing permission for GPLv2 or later, if a  
similar agreement could be reached from other copyright holders, or if  
the file eventually changes to the point where none of the original  
v2-only code remains, and if what is left isn't considered derivative  
of that older code.  Likewise, it could be useful (in conjunction with  
git history) if code gets moved from one file to another.

As for which parts are considered a derivative, I am not a lawyer and  
can't answer that.  It's not a licensing question, but rather a basic  
copyright question.  The point is that it wouldn't be Freescale raising  
a copyright complaint[1] if you were to license it as v2 or later.

It was a response to your asking for no more v2-only code in U-Boot.   
We can remove the above text (except the actual copyright line) and  
make it clearly v2-only if you'd prefer.

-Scott

[1] If you were to actually relicense U-Boot to v3, we'd have a  
different sort of complaint, in that we'd probably want to fork, but  
that's separate from licensing.