Richard Stallman wrote:
Files without a copyright notice and a license notice are a legal problem.
Legally, every file is copyrighted. If there's no copyright notice, that just means it gives no info about who the copyright holder is.
The lack of a license notice is a problem. If the file is trivial, just a few lines, maybe it does not matter. But otherwise, if there is no license, that means it doesn't give people permission to copy or change or redistribute the file. Perhaps even the U-boot developers don't have this permission.
Agreed. I was just doing a simplistic grep looking for "fingerprints" of GPL and BSD licenses and I did not find them in 436 files. I looked at a couple of files to confirm that my greping wasn't over simplistic (it wasn't in the cases I checked). I also did not see any licenses other than GPL or BSD, but I did not look at many of the files in question so it is possible that there are other licenses out there, but probably not.
I did *not* analyze the files for complexity and appropriateness of copyright/license information in the file. That should be done regardless of the results of the GPLv3 debate and the files that should have copyright/license information in their headers need to be either fixed or replaced.
Best regards, gvb