On Fri, Sep 23, 2016 at 11:34:21AM -0600, Jason Gunthorpe wrote: > 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. It looks like a lot of work to do and it can be handled by anyone. Can OPA handle this? > > Jason
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