What

Manual backport of merged #2293 for the legacy 12.9.x layout.

• add the canonical root LICENSE and synchronize the cuda-bindings, cuda-python, and cuda-core distribution copies
• set Apache-2.0 package metadata and include the license in the affected distributions
• convert maintained, generated, legacy, example, test, documentation, cuda-core, and shared tooling headers to Apache-2.0
• remove legacy EULA blocks and enable cuda-bindings contributions through DCO sign-off
• remove the 12.9.x cuda-core/tooling SPDX exceptions so all non-QA source uses Apache-2.0
• add cuda-core's NOTICE to its source distribution and update cuda-pathfinder's Apache license copyright notice

Generator

The bindings were regenerated with cybind 258713af5196bce19077abef2a588390fed3d337 using --ctk-target-version 12.9.0.

cuFile is a 12.9.x special case because it builds against the installed, non-megaheader cufile.h. Following maintainer guidance, generation temporarily restricted config_cufile.py to its 12.9.1 header entry. The generated result contained no CUDA 13 cuFile APIs or types; all six non-comment cuFile implementation files remain frozen at the existing 12.9.x output, while their Apache licensing changes remain in this PR.

Driver, runtime, and NVRTC target 12.9.0. The dynamically loaded nvFatbin, nvJitLink, NVML, and NVVM bindings retain cybind's multi-version output through 13.3.0.

Validation

• stock generation with the cuFile 12.9.1 configuration completed successfully
• all 12.9.x pre-commit hooks passed
• a clean CUDA 12.9 native bindings build completed successfully with the regenerated output
• 131 targeted nvFatbin, nvJitLink, NVVM, cuFile, and utility tests passed with 5 skips; 8 sm_60 nvJitLink cases were excluded because CUDA 12.9 reports ERROR_UNSUPPORTED_ARCH
• no post-12.9 cuFile type, enum, or function is present, and no non-comment cuFile implementation change is included
• cuda-python and cuda-bindings wheels and sdists report License-Expression: Apache-2.0 and License-File: LICENSE with exact canonical license bytes
• cuda-core and cuda-pathfinder sdists report License-Expression: Apache-2.0; cuda-core includes both LICENSE and NOTICE
• the earlier full run had 265 native bindings tests pass with 30 expected skips; two host-sensitive CUDA conditional-graph and OpenGL assertions failed
• 9 Cython interoperability tests and 27 bindings utility tests passed
• bindings documentation built successfully
• root, cuda_bindings, cuda_python, and cuda_core license files are byte-identical
• no proprietary identifier or EULA text remains outside the intentionally proprietary qa/ tree