Kevin Wolf <kw...@redhat.com> writes: > Am 13.03.2013 um 19:19 hat Markus Armbruster geschrieben: >> Kevin Wolf <kw...@redhat.com> writes: >> >> > Am 12.03.2013 um 06:01 hat Wenchao Xia geschrieben: >> >> Oops, Since it belongs to block layer I hope it can be LGPL2. Do you >> >> know how to contact Fabrice Bellard to ask for a change? >> > >> > Fabrice is not the only copyright owner of this file. >> > >> > Just copy the license as it is, changing licenses is always a nasty >> > thing and as I'm not a lawyer I prefer to stay on the safe side. The MIT >> > license works well enough, there's no real reason to change it. >> >> *Relicensing* a file is indeed "nasty" in the sense that it's a huge >> hassle: you have to track down all copyright holders and get their >> permission. >> >> But this isn't relicensing. This is exercising your *right* to >> incorporate permissively-licensed stuff into work covered by a >> compatible, stronger license. That right was irrevocably granted to you >> by the copyright holders. You don't have to ask anyone to exercise it. > > But you have to do it right. This specific patch would introduce a > copyright violation. It's really not that hard to conform to the terms > of the MIT license, but that doesn't mean that you can ignore it. There > is exactly one requirement and it reads like this: > > The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be > included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.
That's why I pointed to resources and examples on how to do it properly. > (I'm still waiting for a patch to blockdev.c, for which you did it > wrong, by the way) Oops, that one fell through the cracks. Patch coming. >> Of course, the stronger license still has to be compatible with GPLv2, >> so we can accept the result into QEMU. >> >> If a subsystem has additional requirements on licenses, its maintainers >> will explain them to you. For what it's worth, substantial parts of the >> block layer are already GPLv2+. > > What parts exactly? As long as there are plans for a libqblock and as > long as it doesn't seem completely impossible to have it under LGPL, I > will ask to use either MIT or LGPL for block layer code (this doesn't > apply to qemu-only code that isn't used in the tools - in this sense, > things like blockdev.c are not part of the block layer) $ git-grep -lw GPL block block* block-migration.c block/blkverify.c block/gluster.c block/linux-aio.c block/raw-aio.h block/rbd.c block/sheepdog.c blockdev-nbd.c blockdev.c >> You don't *have* to switch to a stronger license, of course. It's your >> choice. Myself, I prefer to protect any substantial work I do with a >> strong copyleft license such as GPLv2+. > > And it's my choice if I accept a patch that does nothing except moving > code and switching to a stronger license. It feels wrong to do this, > even though it may be legal. If you want to change the license for > whatever reason, you should at least add substantial code of your own to > justify this. I wouldn't submit such a patch. Not everything that's legal is proper.
