Em Tue, 31 Mar 2020 15:06:08 +0300 Laurent Pinchart <laurent.pinchart@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> escreveu: > I've however been thinking about licenses for > build system files recently, and I'll hijack this thread a bit to ask a > question :-) Ok, I'll change the subject, as the answers won't be related to the Kernel :-) > For a project like the Linux kernel, and especially for subsystems that > are covered by a single license, the choice is easy, we can apply the > same license to the build files. However, for a project that contains > components covered by different licenses (such as, for instance, an LGPL > library, a GPL application and a BSD plugin), how should the license > covering the build system files be selected ? I searched a bit for > guidance on this topic, and couldn't find much. Then everything becomes a way more complex :-) I guess nobody has a clear answer for that. Also, IANAL. What I can tell is what it would makes sense for me. The big impact of a complex licenses model would be for the ones packaging it on some distro, and for the users of such distros. The distros need to know if they have the rights to redistribute, and need to notify their usages about each package's license. Let's assume a project "foo-utils" that has such complexity. Assuming a project that started on a green field (like libcamera), and such project doesn't use stuff from external libraries, what one could do would be to design it in a way that different licenses would be packaged differently. For instance: foo-libs # everything here is under LGPL foo-bsd-plugin # everything here is under BSD foo-utils # everything here is under GPLv3 Then, on each of them, a COPYING.foo file (or whatever other way distros would use to identify the per-package license) would contain the license with applied to it. Btw, if you want to take a look on a real-case scenario, see, for example: https://build.opensuse.org/package/view_file/devel:libraries:c_c++/v4l-utils/v4l-utils.spec?rev=a250bff0f849e8c2fa7e476a1f2849a8 %package -n libv4l-devel License: LGPLv2+ ... %package -n qv4l2 License: GPLv2+ Btw, GStreamer actually follows a similar approach, but they even split those into different git trees (core, good, bad and ugly plugins). Thanks, Mauro
