Re: [PATCH 1/2] multipath-tools: move COPYING to COPYING.LESSER

From: Martin Wilck <mwilck@suse.com>
To: Xose Vazquez Perez <xose.vazquez@gmail.com>,
	Christophe Varoqui <christophe.varoqui@opensvc.com>
Cc: device-mapper development <dm-devel@redhat.com>
Subject: Re: [PATCH 1/2] multipath-tools: move COPYING to COPYING.LESSER
Date: Mon, 09 Apr 2018 21:08:10 +0200	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <1523300890.3525.55.camel@suse.com> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <9ad33b55-17fc-9ed9-ca11-2be0e11a7b1f@gmail.com>

On Mon, 2018-04-09 at 19:29 +0200, Xose Vazquez Perez wrote:
> On 04/09/2018 05:57 PM, Martin Wilck wrote:
> 
> > There are >130 files in the multipath-tools source code which don't
> > have a license header. So far my *assumption* was that these files
> > were
> > covered by COPYING, which used to be LGPLv2.0.
> 
> They are under their _original_ licence. Nothing was changed inside
> the files.

Would you care to enlighten me what this "original license" might be?
The files themselves contain no information about it.

> > By changing COPYING to
> > GPLv2.0, you effectively changed the license of all these files
> > from
> > LPGLv2.0 to GPLv2.0
> 
> There is no evidence of that in any place. All references to the
> COPYING file are
> external files/code, with GPL licence.

This is not about the files you refer to. The reference in those files
was obiously wrong until your patch was merged. (I admit that's a +1
for your patch).

This is about the files that have *no license header*. We *must* assume
that they are covered by a central license file in the top directory.
If we don't do that, it'd be questionable if said files are
distributable at all. Legally, they'd probably not be considered FLOSS.
Files without explicit copyright are be covered by regular copyright
law, meaning that copying and redistribution are _not_ allowed under
most legislations.

I hope that makes it clear why we need to be firm that these files are
covered by the top license file. That central license file used to be
COPYING. The point of my post was that we have *two* such files now,
and without resorting to history it's impossible to tell which file is
covered by which license (and even with history it's hard, but that's
another posting).

Historically, these files were added to the tree by Christophe, and
he'd copied the LGPLv2.0 text into COPYING, thus it seems likely that
he meant them to be under LGPLv2.0.

Martin

-- 
Dr. Martin Wilck <mwilck@suse.com>, Tel. +49 (0)911 74053 2107
SUSE Linux GmbH, GF: Felix Imendörffer, Jane Smithard, Graham Norton
HRB 21284 (AG Nürnberg)

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