[Buildroot] [PATCH v2 3/5] COPYING: add exception about patch licensing

[Thomas Petazzoni <thomas.petazzoni@free-electrons.com>]

Hello,

On Thu, 4 Feb 2016 21:42:24 +0100, Yann E. MORIN wrote:

> Not really. It is implicitly addressed, since the above states:
> 
>     [The patches] are provided under the same license as the software
>     they apply to.
> 
> So, if someone has a proprietary license for a package *we* only can get
> under an Open Source license, that someone would potentially be tricked
> into believing that the patches we carry are under the license he was
> provided that package under. Which is not really true, see below...
> 
> There are only two options:
> 
> 
>  1) Our patches are available under the same license as the package they
>     apply to is publicly and commonly available under.
> 
>     This basically means the patches can't be applied to a proprietary-
>     licensed package when it is only publicly and commonly available
>     under a Free (aka GPL-like) license. However, for an Open Source
>     (aka BSD-like) license, they might still be useable on a proprietary-

The BSD license is both a Free Software license and an Open Source
Software license. The GPL is both a Free Software license and an Open
Source Software license.

I think you wanted to make the distinction between copyleft licenses
and non-copyleft licenses, which has rigorously *nothing* to do in the
Free vs. Open debate.

>  2) Our patches are available under a license that allows them to still
>     be applied even if the recipient of the package they modify has been
>     granted different licensing terms (aka proprietary) than the ones
>     that package is publicly and commonly available under.
> 
>     This means that part of the software we write is no longer Free (as
>     from a GPL-sided point-of-view), basically this is a blank check for
>     including them in proprietary software.
> 
>     Furthermore, we can not know all the proprietary licenses each such
>     package may be available under, by the mere fact that such licenses
>     may not be publicly known. In most, if not all jurisdiction, one can
>     not be bound by terms one does not have knowledge of. I.e. if we
>     wanted our patches to be useable under those licenses, then we would
>     have to provide our patches under a *very* liberal license, probably
>     just the Public Domain, as any license, even the most liberal ones
>     like the WTFPL, may have terms that contradicts terms of such a
>     proprietary license (which we have no detail for).
> 
>     Finally, this can not apply to our existing patches, as we can not
>     assume that the original submitters of those patches would have
>     expected they be made available under any license beside the license
>     under which the package is publicly and commonly available.  I.e.
>     we're anyway screwed with existing patches.

Not to mention the fact that we often re-use patches from other
projects: from the upstream project, from OpenEmbedded, OpenWRT, Alpine
Linux, and others.

The Yocto Project documentation says "Patches to the Yocto Project
follow the upstream licensing
scheme." (http://www.yoctoproject.org/docs/1.8/dev-manual/dev-manual.html).
Not super clear.

> We *really* need to sort out this situation, so that we all agree on
> what the license for our patches are. Needless to say that I will
> strongly advocate that we settle on the first solution.

I don't think we have any other solution but to release them only under
the publicly available open-source license. As you put it, we do not
even know the terms of the Qt or MySQL commercial licenses, so we can
hardly release code under those licenses.

So I'd say we should restrict ourselves to the open-source license of
the publicly available versions. Those who use the commercial variant
of those packages are on their own, and if they are using a commercial
variant, they should have access to support from their vendor.

Best regards,

Thomas
-- 
Thomas Petazzoni, CTO, Free Electrons
Embedded Linux, Kernel and Android engineering
http://free-electrons.com