Re: [PATCH rdma-core] Improve global COPYING files

[Leon Romanovsky <leon-DgEjT+Ai2ygdnm+yROfE0A@public.gmane.org>]

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On Wed, Oct 05, 2016 at 03:49:39PM +0300, Leon Romanovsky wrote:
> On Fri, Sep 23, 2016 at 11:34:21AM -0600, Jason Gunthorpe wrote:
> > On Fri, Sep 23, 2016 at 08:10:03PM +0300, Leon Romanovsky wrote:
> >
> > > I sure that this question will sound dumb for you, but can we unify all
> > > code under OFA's licenses (dual-license)? I don't feel comfortable with
> > > this multi-license situation.
> >
> > It is an excellent question.
> >
> > To do this we would need the OFA to talk to each of the member
> > companies and get them to sign some kind of legal change of copyright
> > document. Assuming all of the member companies agree, and all the
> > member companies are the exhaustive copyright owners then the code can
> > be placed under a single uniform license.
> >
> > As I understand it all OFA members were required to agree to use a
> > specific licensing scheme, including specific license text when they
> > signed the OFA membership agreement. What we are seeing here is that
> > the corporate legal side agreed to something but the developers made
> > small errors along the way, and those errors were later copied by
> > other developers and spread widely. So the OFA has a basis for
> > requests of this nature.
> >
> > For instance, a legal statement from Mellanox that all code they
> > contributed is available under the GPLv2 or *either* MIT or FreeBSD
> > license varient would allow immediately placing all Mellanox
> > copyrighted code under the single Default License. I expect this is
> > what Mellanox intended to do anyhow, the fact that ibverbs and all
> > their providers had an error in the COPYING file is simply
> > an unfortunate mistake.
> >
> > These sorts of license issues are typical in historical code bases. I
> > would say we are in pretty good shape, from what I can tell absolutely
> > everything is unambiguously licensed under at least the GPLv2, or a
> > compatible license.
> >
> > Almost everything is alternatively licensed under some kind of BSD
> > license. The notable exception is ipathverbs and rxe. It is also
> > unfortunate we have so many BSD variants.
> >
> > Further, almost all C code is licensed under the dual GPLv2/OpenIB.org
> > (MIT) license. The kernel is similar, almost all C code is using the
> > MIT variant. Hence my desire to make that the license for new code in
> > the tree.
> >
> > I would say this is a pretty good result.
> >
> > My ultimate suggestion is that we push the non-default copyright into
> > the impacted files, eg add short licenses headers to the man pages,
> > etc, and then delete the extraneous COPYING files once every single
> > file has a correct license statement. From that point we can look at
> > switching individual files based on the above Legal process to the
> > Default License, or just leave them as is - a historical quirk.
>
> It looks like a lot of work to do and it can be handled by anyone.
> Can OPA handle this?

Sorry,
OFA and not OPA.

>
> >
> > Jason



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