Quote Originally Posted by GreatEmerald View Post
Huh, really? Individual files can override the global license? Then what's the point of having a global license to begin with? And what does "relicensing the kernel" even mean in that case? After all, if a code file is under BSD, and people want to relicense the kernel to BSD, then it's not really relicensing for that particular code file...
Its the same point of having exceptions and EXPORT_SYMBOL / EXPORT_SYMBOL_GPL you don't necessarily WANT everything to be affected by the viral nature of the GPL. Sometimes you WANT things to be able to freely interface with the kernel without necessarily being open source.

Think of the X server.

KMS is a GPL interface, The X Server is MIT licensed. We have closed source drivers though because they replace the GPL parts with their own code and then interface through the X server.