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
