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Comment by rescbr | Hacker News Reader

Each file has their own license, and they are on the same repo.

The GPL is (in)famously viral. You can't base something on a GPLed codebase and say that your thing isn't covered by the GPL. The GPL is specifically designed to forbid that specific thing.

You can take BSD-licensed code and package it into a GPL bundle, which is what the kernel is doing. You can also extract the BSD-licensed code without the GPL-licensed code and it will be fine.

It depends on how closely the code is coupled to the rest of the project. Traditionally, sharing an address space carried the GPL taint. There's nuance to it, of course, but the question was never really settled, and nowadays people just ignore licenses.

OpenBSD has a strict "no GPL" policy. It does not incorporate GPL code in the kernel, and it has slowly weeded out GPL code from userland. This is one reason why it builds with Clang instead of GCC.

If Linux DRM weren't licensed under more permissive terms, OpenBSD simply wouldn't permit its inclusion.

When you link GPL code with your proprietary code into a binary (shared address space), and distribute the binary to people, those people are entitled to your proprietary source code.

When I compile my GPL code with a copy of somebody else's MIT code into a binary (shared address space), other people's copy of that MIT code is still MIT licensed.

> Traditionally, sharing an address space carried the GPL taint.

Clearly two different files don't share the same address space. So no problem.

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