code.delx.au - refind/blob - filesystems/LICENSE.txt

   1 Licensing for the filesystem drivers is complex. Three different licenses
   2 apply to various parts of the code:
   3
   4 * Christoph Pfisterer's original file system wrapper (FSW) code is covered
   5   by a BSD-style license. Many of the source files with names that take the
   6   form fsw_*.[ch] are so licensed, but this is NOT generally true of
   7   filesystem-specific files (e.g., fsw_ext2.c or fsw_btrfs.c).
   8
   9 * Certain filesystem drivers are licensed under the GPLv2, either because
  10   they borrow code from the Linux kernel or because a developer (typically
  11   Oracle) applied the GPLv2 license to them. This is true of the ext2fs,
  12   ext4fs, ReiserFS, HFS+, and ISO-9660 drivers.
  13
  14 * At least one filesystem driver (Btrfs) uses code taken from GRUB, and so
  15   uses the GPLv3 (or later) license.
  16
  17 Note that the GPLv2 and GPLv3 are, ironically, not compatible licenses.
  18 Thus, code from GPLv2 and GPLv3 projects should not be mixed. The BSD
  19 license used by Pfisterer's original code is compatible with both versions
  20 of the GPL, so the fact that both GPLv2 and GPLv3 drivers is built upon it
  21 is OK. If you intend to contribute to this project's drivers or use the
  22 code yourself, please keep this fact in mind.
  23
  24 The below was written by Christoph Pfisterer with respect to his original
  25 code:
  26
  27  File System Wrapper License
  28 =============================
  29
  30 The various parts of the File System Wrapper source code come from
  31 different sources and may carry different licenses. Here's a quick
  32 account of the situation:
  33
  34  * The core code was written from scratch and is covered by a
  35    BSD-style license.
  36
  37  * The EFI host driver was written from scratch, possibly using code
  38    from the TianoCore project and Intel's EFI Application Toolkit. It
  39    is covered by a BSD-style license.
  40
  41  * The ext2 and reiserfs file system drivers use definitions from the
  42    Linux kernel source. The actual code was written from scratch,
  43    using multiple sources for reference. These drivers are covered by
  44    the GNU GPL.
  45
  46 For more details, see each file's boilerplate comment. The full text
  47 of the GNU GPL is in the file LICENSE_GPL.txt.