[Buildroot] [PATCH v2] barebox: fix license information

On 08/28/12 22:54, Thomas Petazzoni wrote:

Le Tue, 28 Aug 2012 19:48:08 +0200,
Arnout Vandecappelle[off-list ref]  a ?crit :

quoted

quoted

Also, uboot.mk mentions that the license is GPLv2+, but the U-Boot
COPYING file says:

    U-Boot is Free Software.  It is copyrighted by Wolfgang Denk and
many others who contributed code (see the actual source code for
details).  You can redistribute U-Boot and/or modify it under the
terms of version 2 of the GNU General Public License as published by
the Free Software Foundation.  Most of it can also be distributed,
at your option, under any later version of the GNU General Public
License -- see individual files for exceptions.

So I guess that formally speaking U-Boot is GPLv2 only, and not GPLv2+.

   Given the large number of special cases we've encountered in the licensing
support, I propose that we require one or two Acks on all licensing patches.
And for new packages, the Acks should explicitly mention that it Acks the
license information.  Failing the Acks, it could still be committed with
a flag that it needs review, e.g. "GPLv2+ (needs review)".

   I think for the legal-info, we should really be conservative. Now that it
exists, people will rely on it.  And if they rely on the wrong information,
they could be in trouble.

Well, this means having to wait even more before being able to commit a
new package, I'm not sure I like to see more "bureaucracy" when it
comes to getting patches applied. Instead, getting things in movement
usually encourages people to react when something looks wrong. I.e, if
I had left out the barebox and u-boot patches from Simon, maybe nobody
would have commented on them... The fact that I took action by
committing them got the discussion started, we fixed the problems, and
we're good.

  That's why I say: commit it with (needs review).  That will attract more
reviews than having it either without legal-info, or with the wrong
legal-info.

quoted

   OTOH, the trouble would probably just be from your own legal department...
Copyright holders who create complex, inconsistent licenses are very
unlikely to try to enforce them.  And also the FSFE and similar organisations
will just go for the obvious GPL violations.  So maybe I'm just being
unnecessarily paranoid here...

Just like we don't provide any guarantees of the proper functioning of
Buildroot, we don't provide any guarantees of the correctness of the
license information. Now, of course, it's up to us as a community to
ensure that Buildroot works fine (it builds what you need) and has the
most correct licensing information as possible, but we're not trying to
provide 100% guarantees here.

  The difference is that buildroot users are likely to test the resulting
rootfs, but are very unlikely to look a second time at the output of
legal-info.  It's very difficult to "test" the legal-info - all you have
is "code review". For me, the wrong information in legal-info is an order
of magnitude worse than no legal-info at all.


  That said, none of my dozens of customers ever gave a whit about licenses.
The most they'd do is verify that there's no GPL linked against the app.
So after this post I'll shut up about it.


  Regards,
  Arnout

-- 
Arnout Vandecappelle                               arnout at mind be
Senior Embedded Software Architect                 +32-16-286540
Essensium/Mind                                     http://www.mind.be
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