[dm-devel] What license is multipath-tools under
James Bottomley
James.Bottomley at HansenPartnership.com
Thu Jul 28 18:59:33 UTC 2016
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
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