Re: What license is multipath-tools under

[James Bottomley <James.Bottomley@HansenPartnership.com>]

[-- Attachment #1.1: Type: text/plain, Size: 2592 bytes --]

On Fri, 2016-07-29 at 00:11 +0530, Ritesh Raj Sarraf wrote:
> Hello James,
> 
> On Thu, 2016-07-28 at 13:26 -0400, James Bottomley wrote:
> > On Thu, 2016-07-28 at 22:23 +0530, Ritesh Raj Sarraf wrote:
> > > Thanks Xose, for digging this information. But shouldn't this 
> > > information go into respective source files?
> > 
> > If there's a COPYING file, there's no need for individual files to
> > have
> > a copyright.  The licence of the file defaults to whatever COPYING
> > (or
> > LICENCE or some recognizable top level file says).  A significant
> > number of Linux Kernel files don't have individual file header
> > copyrigh
> > ts, if you want an example of this.
> 
> Yes. But as I understand, the entire Linux [1] code base is GPLv2
> only.

No it's not: We have a ton of dual licenced files (dual GPL/BSD is the
most common) and quite a few GPLv2+ ones.  Of course, all of those have
headers explaining the difference from COPYING (or at the very least
MODULE_LICENSE tags).

>  Whereas in case of multipath-tools, as Xose mentioned in the 
> previous email, it is a mix of:
> 
> * GPLv2 (only?)
> * GPLv2+
> * LGPLv2

This is also rather common.  Look at the COPYING file of the CRIU
project for instance

https://github.com/xemul/criu/blob/master/COPYING

It has a split GPL/LGPL model depending on which directory the file is
placed in.

> Having this information in the source repository (not necessarily as 
> individual source headers) will speak out much clear.
> 
> I think something like Debian's Machine-readable copyright format 
> will be a good fit in this case.
> 
> https://www.debian.org/doc/packaging-manuals/copyright-format/1.0/
> 
> An example project, with mixed licenses:
> http://metadata.ftp-master.debian.org/changelogs/main/libs/libstorage
> mgmt/unstable_copyright
> 
> BTW, this topic hit my mind 2 days ago when I looked at the aging 
> (old format) multipath-tools/debian/copyright in my packaging repo
> and wanted to
> fix it.
> 
> http://metadata.ftp-master.debian.org/changelogs/main/m/multipath-too
> ls/unstable_copyright
> 
> 
> 
> I have attached a patch for a copyright file, based on what Xose had 
> mentioned in the email. There still are files, like  libmultipath/pri
> oritizers/alua.c, which mention the license as plain GPL. So, this 
> patch is still not complete.
> 
> 
> [1] with some minor exceptions I just noticed.

That's up to the maintainer of multipath-tools.  I was just point out
that doing this isn't required or even standard practice.

James

[-- Attachment #1.2: This is a digitally signed message part --]
[-- Type: application/pgp-signature, Size: 819 bytes --]

[-- Attachment #2: Type: text/plain, Size: 0 bytes --]