Re: Linux Kernel.org email address

[Dmitry Alexandrov]

Jacinto Moreno <jacinto.moreno@outlook.com> writes:

IANAL, TINLA.

> Hi,Our company has made some small modifications to the Linux Kernel
> and in order to be compliant with GPLv2 I wanted to send an email to
> kernel.org with the patches we
> made.https://www.kernel.org/doc/pending/gplv2-howto.html
> "... send the patch file to the project's developers, either directly
> in email or to the project's development mailing list."

GNU GPLv2 (as well as any other free software licence) has no such a
requirement — to send ‘patches’ (i. e. modifications) upstream or
anywhere else.  You are free to use modified program internally, as well
as you are free to provide the correspondent source code (N. B. not the
‘patches’, but the full source code) to users of your program only.

You might read the article at kernel.org more carefully and find out
that it actually does *not* say that you must to do it, instead it is
written is in such a cunning way that made you believe that this
requirement exists.  However, it also seems to include some minor
statements that are clearly false.  So if you’d like to learn more about
GNU GPLv2, you’d better look through its actual text [0] (unlike many
legal documents, free licences are mostly written in a human language),
and the GNU GPLv2 FAQ [1].

[0] https://www.gnu.org/licenses/old-licenses/gpl-2.0.html
[1] https://www.gnu.org/licenses/old-licenses/gpl-2.0-faq.html

On the other hand, it indeed would be generous of you towards free
software to publish your modifications at no fee and send them upstream.

> I was wondering if anybody knows to which e-mail address I need to send the 
> email to?

Linux® developers mailing lists are hosted on http://vger.kernel.org.  You might
find the full list of list at http://vger.kernel.org/vger-lists.html