On Mon, Nov 01, 2021 at 11:52:57AM +0000, Daniel P. Berrangé wrote:
On Mon, Nov 01, 2021 at 11:30:07AM +0000, Richard W.M. Jones wrote:
> On Mon, Nov 01, 2021 at 09:32:37AM +0000, Daniel P. Berrangé wrote:
> > On Sun, Oct 31, 2021 at 06:20:05PM +0000, Richard W.M. Jones wrote:
> > > On Sun, Oct 31, 2021 at 06:59:32PM +0200, Nir Soffer wrote:
> > > > Having different license for the tests complicates everyone life for
no
> > > > benefit. Change the license to LGPL2+ like the rest of the library.
> > > >
> > > > Related discussion:
> > > >
https://listman.redhat.com/archives/libguestfs/2021-October/msg00196.html
> > > >
> > > > Signed-off-by: Nir Soffer <nsoffer(a)redhat.com>
> > >
> > > I agree with this change.
> > >
> > > Since this involves some code that I wrote originally, can you add:
> > >
> > > Signed-off-by: Richard W.M. Jones <rjones(a)redhat.com>
> > >
> > > However I'm not the only author here (by quite a lot!):
> > >
> > > $ git shortlog -s
golang/src/libguestfs.org/libnbd/
> > > 13 Eric Blake
> > > 2 Nir Soffer
> > > 4 Richard W.M. Jones
> > >
> > > so could be a good idea to ask Eric specifically for permission too
> > > (even though in both cases the © is likely assigned to Red Hat as our
> > > employer).
> >
> > Looking at libnbd.git as a whole I see
> >
> > 1 Author: anson <83398016+anson-lo(a)users.noreply.github.com>
> > 1 Author: Chris Lamb <lamby(a)debian.org>
> > 324 Author: Eric Blake <eblake(a)redhat.com>
> > 1 Author: Laszlo Ersek <lersek(a)redhat.com>
> > 52 Author: Martin Kletzander <mkletzan(a)redhat.com>
> > 5 Author: Nir Soffer <nirsof(a)gmail.com>
> > 33 Author: Nir Soffer <nsoffer(a)redhat.com>
> > 2 Author: Pino Toscano <ptoscano(a)redhat.com>
> > 936 Author: Richard W.M. Jones <rjones(a)redhat.com>
> >
> >
> > only two patches from non-Red Hat people, and both of those patches
> > are trivial bug fixes so could be said to be non-copyrigtable changes.
> > With this in mind, I would suggest that it is viable to remove all the
> > license headers across the codebase and add SPDX tags in their place.
>
> While viable, we did discuss this already and decided against it for
> now -- we'll watch what qemu & libvirt are doing.
QEMU / libvirt aren't liekly to adopt SPDX for their main repos because
they both have a huge variety of copyright holders, so it is not viable
to get permission to replace the license headers with SPDX tags. The
kernel adopted SPDX despite not getting permission from all copyright
holders, but they went through some kind of auditing process with legal
oversight to have confidence that is is OK. I don't know enough about
the fine details to be able to suggest copying that approach.
libnbd is fortunately not in this situation because it is essentially
all (C) Red Hat.
IOW, don't wait for libvirt/QEMU - decide it for libnbd on its own
merits.
FWIW, I'm using SPDX tags for any new projects I create from scratch
going forward e.g.
https://gitlab.com/bichon-project/bichon/
To sum up here, we asked legal for advice and concluded that for
projects like libnbd which are either wholly copyrighted by Red Hat,
or where external contributions are extremely minimal, that it would
be OK to replace the (L)GPL boilerplate with SPDX notices.
Rich.
--
Richard Jones, Virtualization Group, Red Hat
http://people.redhat.com/~rjones
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