xref: /openbmc/u-boot/Licenses/README (revision 64bd89e4)
1  U-Boot is Free Software.  It is copyrighted by Wolfgang Denk and
2many others who contributed code (see the actual source code and the
3git commit messages for details).  You can redistribute U-Boot and/or
4modify it under the terms of version 2 of the GNU General Public
5License as published by the Free Software Foundation.  Most of it can
6also be distributed, at your option, under any later version of the
7GNU General Public License -- see individual files for exceptions.
8
9  NOTE! This license does *not* cover the so-called "standalone"
10applications that use U-Boot services by means of the jump table
11provided by U-Boot exactly for this purpose - this is merely
12considered normal use of U-Boot, and does *not* fall under the
13heading of "derived work" -- see file  Licenses/Exceptions  for
14details.
15
16  Also note that the GPL and the other licenses are copyrighted by
17the Free Software Foundation and other organizations, but the
18instance of code that they refer to (the U-Boot source code) is
19copyrighted by me and others who actually wrote it.
20-- Wolfgang Denk
21
22
23Like many other projects, U-Boot has a tradition of including big
24blocks of License headers in all files.  This not only blows up the
25source code with mostly redundant information, but also makes it very
26difficult to generate License Clearing Reports.  An additional problem
27is that even the same licenses are referred to by a number of
28slightly varying text blocks (full, abbreviated, different
29indentation, line wrapping and/or white space, with obsolete address
30information, ...) which makes automatic processing a nightmare.
31
32To make this easier, such license headers in the source files will be
33replaced with a single line reference to Unique License Identifiers
34as defined by the Linux Foundation's SPDX project [1].  For example,
35in a source file the full "GPL v2.0 or later" header text will be
36replaced by a single line:
37
38	SPDX-License-Identifier:	GPL-2.0+
39
40Ideally, the license terms of all files in the source tree should be
41defined by such License Identifiers; in no case a file can contain
42more than one such License Identifier list.
43
44If a "SPDX-License-Identifier:" line references more than one Unique
45License Identifier, then this means that the respective file can be
46used under the terms of either of these licenses, i. e. with
47
48	SPDX-License-Identifier:	GPL-2.0+	BSD-3-Clause
49
50you can chose between GPL-2.0+ and BSD-3-Clause licensing.
51
52We use the SPDX Unique License Identifiers here; these are available
53at [2].
54
55[1] http://spdx.org/
56[2] http://spdx.org/licenses/
57
58Full name					SPDX Identifier	OSI Approved	File name		URI
59=======================================================================================================================================
60GNU General Public License v2.0 only		GPL-2.0		Y		gpl-2.0.txt		http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-2.0.txt
61GNU General Public License v2.0 or later	GPL-2.0+	Y		gpl-2.0.txt		http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-2.0.txt
62GNU Library General Public License v2 or later	LGPL-2.0+	Y		lgpl-2.0.txt		http://www.gnu.org/licenses/old-licenses/lgpl-2.0.txt
63GNU Lesser General Public License v2.1 or later	LGPL-2.1+	Y		lgpl-2.1.txt		http://www.gnu.org/licenses/old-licenses/lgpl-2.1.txt
64eCos license version 2.0			eCos-2.0			eCos-2.0.txt		http://www.gnu.org/licenses/ecos-license.html
65BSD 2-Clause License				BSD-2-Clause	Y		bsd-2-clause.txt	http://spdx.org/licenses/BSD-2-Clause
66BSD 3-clause "New" or "Revised" License		BSD-3-Clause	Y		bsd-3-clause.txt	http://spdx.org/licenses/BSD-3-Clause#licenseText
67IBM PIBS (PowerPC Initialization and		IBM-pibs			ibm-pibs.txt
68	Boot Software) license
69