[Intel-xe] [PATCH] fixup! drm/xe: Introduce a new DRM driver for Intel GPUs

[Lucas De Marchi]

On Mon, May 15, 2023 at 03:15:48PM +0000, Francois Dugast wrote:
>From: "Dugast, Francois" <francois.dugast at intel.com>
>
>The driver contains code under GPL v2 license and code under MIT license.

that is the wrong reason for dual license

>
>Link: https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/process/license-rules.html
>Cc: Oded Gabbay <ogabbay at kernel.org>
>Signed-off-by: Dugast, Francois <francois.dugast at intel.com>
>---
> drivers/gpu/drm/xe/xe_module.c | 2 +-
> 1 file changed, 1 insertion(+), 1 deletion(-)
>
>diff --git a/drivers/gpu/drm/xe/xe_module.c b/drivers/gpu/drm/xe/xe_module.c
>index 6860586ce7f8..ae37c229a0b7 100644
>--- a/drivers/gpu/drm/xe/xe_module.c
>+++ b/drivers/gpu/drm/xe/xe_module.c
>@@ -79,4 +79,4 @@ module_exit(xe_exit);
> MODULE_AUTHOR("Intel Corporation");
>
> MODULE_DESCRIPTION(DRIVER_DESC);
>-MODULE_LICENSE("GPL and additional rights");
>+MODULE_LICENSE("Dual MIT/GPL");

The module itself is GPL, like i915:

$ git grep MODULE_LICENSE -- drivers/gpu/drm/i915/
drivers/gpu/drm/i915/gvt/kvmgt.c:MODULE_LICENSE("GPL and additional rights");
drivers/gpu/drm/i915/i915_module.c:MODULE_LICENSE("GPL and additional rights");

GPL can include source files licensed as MIT, but the final license of
the module is still GPL, not dual license. Same thing as from the link
you provided...

	The license described in the COPYING file applies to the kernel
	source as a whole, though individual source files can have a
	different license which is required to be compatible with the
	GPL-2.0

... but applied to the module rather than the whole kernel.

The inverse is not true. You can't license the whole (module) as MIT
since it also contains GPL-licensed files. We could if all the files were
dual-licensed, which is not the case. Since several parts of xe is based
on i915, it'd be a very grey area and license tracking nightmare.

With that, the disclaimer IANAL applies.

Lucas De Marchi

>-- 
>2.34.1
>