Re: [Ksummit-discuss] [CORE TOPIC] GPL enforcement actions

[James Bottomley <James.Bottomley@HansenPartnership.com>]

On Fri, 2015-07-31 at 13:45 -0500, Christoph Lameter wrote:
> On Tue, 7 Jul 2015, Guenter Roeck wrote:
> 
> > ... and then have the LF attorneys brief LF member companies about the
> > outcome of the meeting. I always find those legal briefings very useful.
> 
> One subject that I would like to have some clarification on is relicensing
> of in-kernel-code. There were a couple of license changes recently from
> GPL to "pick onee GPL or BSD" in the infiniband stack. I was a bit
> surprised by that being possible.
> 
> Presumably the copyright holders have to agree to this. What exactly
> qualifies to be a copyright holder? If one is mentioned in the file
> header? If one modified a line of code in the file?

It's the copyright law definition: for a work (or a modification of a
work) to be eligible for copyright protection it (or the modification)
must rise to the level of being original.  There's a lot of case law
over what this means for a book, but very little over what this means
for a computer program.  In one of the book decisions, the US Supreme
Court did say that originality requires "a modicum of creativity" (that
was a case about copyrighting the phone book) which likely applies to
programs as well.  There's also case law that implies things that are
common patterns in programming (like correcting a use after free) may
not be original enough but beyond that, it's anyone's guess.

James