Re: [PATCH 0/7] Split fsverity-utils into a shared library

"Chris Mason" <clm@xxxxxx> · Fri, 31 Jul 2020 13:47:36 -0400

On 31 Jul 2020, at 13:40, Jes Sorensen wrote:

On 7/30/20 1:52 PM, Eric Biggers wrote:

On Wed, Feb 19, 2020 at 06:49:07PM -0500, Jes Sorensen wrote:

We'd also need to follow shared library best practices like 

compiling with

-fvisibility=hidden and marking the API functions explicitly with

__attribute__((visibility("default"))), and setting the 'soname' 

like

-Wl,-soname=libfsverity.so.0.

Also, is the GPLv2+ license okay for the use case?

Personally I only care about linking it into rpm, which is GPL v2, 

so

from my perspective, that is sufficient. I am also fine making it 

LGPL,

but given it's your code I am stealing, I cannot make that call.

Hi Jes, I'd like to revisit this, as I'm concerned about future use 

cases where

software under other licenses (e.g. LGPL, MIT, or Apache 2.0) might 

want to use

libfsverity -- especially if libfsverity grows more functionality.

Also, fsverity-utils links to OpenSSL, which some people (e.g. 

Debian) consider

to be incompatible with GPLv2.

We think the MIT license would offer the

most flexibility.  Are you okay with changing the license of 

fsverity-utils to

MIT?  If so, I'll send a patch and you can give an Acked-by on it.

Thanks!

- Eric

Hi Eric,

I went back through my patches to make sure I didn't reuse code from
other GPL projects. I don't see anything that looks like it was reused
except from fsverity-utils itself, so it should be fine.

I think it's fair to relax the license so other projects can link to 

it.

I would prefer we use the LGPL rather than the MIT license though?

CC'ing Chris Mason as well, since he has the auth to ack it on behalf 

of

the company.

MIT, BSD, LGPL are Signed-off-by: Chris Mason <clm@xxxxxx>

We’re flexible, the goal is just to fit into the rest of fsverity 

overall.

-chris