Asking for clarifications

Asking for clarifications

[Михалева, Екатерина]

To whom it may concern,

My name is Ekaterina Mikhaleva, I am a young researcher and a PhD student,
majoring in IT/IP law.

I would like to clarify how is it possible that the Guix System that is a
free GNU/Linux distribution acknowledged by the FSF uses Linux kernel,
which is licensed under GPLv2, and at the same time Guix System is licensed
under GPLv3?
I am a specialist in law, so I cannot probably grasp all the technical
peculiarities, though I have checked on your website in the "Packages"
section any mentioning on Linux kernel and here
https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/guix.git/tree/gnu/packages/linux.scm#n3138
 I found the following:

   (home-page "https://www.gnu.org/software/linux-libre/")
    (synopsis "GNU Linux-Libre kernel headers")
    (description "Headers of the Linux-Libre kernel.")
    (license license:gpl2)))


As far as I know, GPLv2 and GPLv3 are incompatible and Linux kernel is
licensed strictly under GPLv2 without any possibility to update to any
further version.
I presumed that GPLv2 would make the whole product subject to the term of
this particular license. Still your product is licensed under GPLv3, if I
am correct?

I will be immensely grateful for your clarifications.

Thank you in advance.

Re: Asking for clarifications

[divoplade]

Hello,

Le mardi 09 mars 2021 à 21:03 +0300, Михалева, Екатерина a écrit :
> As far as I know, GPLv2 and GPLv3 are incompatible and Linux kernel
> is
> licensed strictly under GPLv2 without any possibility to update to
> any
> further version.
> I presumed that GPLv2 would make the whole product subject to the
> term of
> this particular license. Still your product is licensed under GPLv3,
> if I
> am correct?

In my limited understanding of what is happening, Guix is not a
derivative work of Linux (a "covered work" according to the GPL, so a
work based on Linux) because it does not use the source code of Linux.
If you were to write a module for Linux (e.g. a driver), it would use a
lot of the non-trivial internal APIs, code and data structures defined
by and for the kernel, so it would be considered a covered work and you
would need to use GPLv2. But this is not the case for Guix.

I’m still looking for more specific answers, though.

Re: Asking for clarifications

[Ricardo Wurmus]

Hi Екатерина,

> I presumed that GPLv2 would make the whole product subject to the term of
> this particular license. Still your product is licensed under GPLv3, if I
> am correct?

Individual packages provided by Guix don’t have to be licensed under
compatible licenses.

The source code of Guix is licensed under GPLv3 or later.  The sources
of Linux are indeed under GPLv2.

There is no single license for the whole system, and we don’t claim that
the whole system is licensed under the license under which the sources
of Guix are released.

-- 
Ricardo