Re: [Qemu-devel] [PATCH] LICENSE: clarify licensing

[Paolo Bonzini <pbonzini@redhat.com>]

Il 19/11/2012 17:40, Anthony Liguori ha scritto:
> There's a couple changes here.  Please note that no one should consider this as
> licensing guidance from IBM.  I'm merely updating this based on what I would
> consider community consensus.
> 
> The first change clarifies that the overall license is GPLv2.  We have never
> had GPLv1 code.  The phrase "GNU General Public License" clearly refers to the
> GPLv2.  We cannot say the overall license is "GPLv2 or later" because we have
> a number of files that are GPLv2 only.
> 
> The second change clarifies that any file that doesn't have an explicit license
> is covered under the GPLv2.  This agrees with the first statement in LICENSE but
> since it's so often asked, I thought we should make it explicit.

No, files that don't have an explicit license are under "GPLv2 or later".

> I also added an additional statement that this file only expresses the intent
> of the QEMU community and should only be considered informative.
> 
> Please explicitly Nack or Ack this change.
> 
> Signed-off-by: Anthony Liguori <aliguori@us.ibm.com>
> ---
>  LICENSE | 8 ++++++--
>  1 file changed, 6 insertions(+), 2 deletions(-)
> 
> diff --git a/LICENSE b/LICENSE
> index acae9a3..f4bee4c 100644
> --- a/LICENSE
> +++ b/LICENSE
> @@ -1,6 +1,6 @@
>  The following points clarify the QEMU license:
>  
> -1) QEMU as a whole is released under the GNU General Public License
> +1) QEMU as a whole is released under the GNU General Public License version 2
>  
>  2) Parts of QEMU have specific licenses which are compatible with the
>  GNU General Public License. Hence each source file contains its own
> @@ -13,4 +13,8 @@ Many hardware device emulation sources are released under the BSD license.
>  
>  4) QEMU is a trademark of Fabrice Bellard.
>  
> -Fabrice Bellard.
> +5) Files without explicit licenses fall under the GPL v2.
> +
> +6) This file represents the consensus view of the QEMU community.  It does not
> +   alter any licenses used in the code base

... for individual files...

> + and should be viewed as informative
> +   only.
> 

Paolo