On Fri, Sep 23, 2016 at 08:10:03PM +0300, Leon Romanovsky wrote: > I sure that this question will sound dumb for you, but can we unify all > code under OFA's licenses (dual-license)? I don't feel comfortable with > this multi-license situation. It is an excellent question. To do this we would need the OFA to talk to each of the member companies and get them to sign some kind of legal change of copyright document. Assuming all of the member companies agree, and all the member companies are the exhaustive copyright owners then the code can be placed under a single uniform license. As I understand it all OFA members were required to agree to use a specific licensing scheme, including specific license text when they signed the OFA membership agreement. What we are seeing here is that the corporate legal side agreed to something but the developers made small errors along the way, and those errors were later copied by other developers and spread widely. So the OFA has a basis for requests of this nature. For instance, a legal statement from Mellanox that all code they contributed is available under the GPLv2 or *either* MIT or FreeBSD license varient would allow immediately placing all Mellanox copyrighted code under the single Default License. I expect this is what Mellanox intended to do anyhow, the fact that ibverbs and all their providers had an error in the COPYING file is simply an unfortunate mistake. These sorts of license issues are typical in historical code bases. I would say we are in pretty good shape, from what I can tell absolutely everything is unambiguously licensed under at least the GPLv2, or a compatible license. Almost everything is alternatively licensed under some kind of BSD license. The notable exception is ipathverbs and rxe. It is also unfortunate we have so many BSD variants. Further, almost all C code is licensed under the dual GPLv2/OpenIB.org (MIT) license. The kernel is similar, almost all C code is using the MIT variant. Hence my desire to make that the license for new code in the tree. I would say this is a pretty good result. My ultimate suggestion is that we push the non-default copyright into the impacted files, eg add short licenses headers to the man pages, etc, and then delete the extraneous COPYING files once every single file has a correct license statement. From that point we can look at switching individual files based on the above Legal process to the Default License, or just leave them as is - a historical quirk. Jason -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-rdma" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
