Re: Relicensing an Apache-licensed recipe as MIT

From: Jussi Kukkonen <jussi.kukkonen@intel.com>
To: Paul Eggleton <paul.eggleton@linux.intel.com>
Cc: Yocto Project <yocto@yoctoproject.org>
Subject: Re: Relicensing an Apache-licensed recipe as MIT
Date: Wed, 12 Apr 2017 13:50:04 +0300	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <CAHiDW_GipiELX4dDs3sYPm7V9SUGZnQDLOLbwJM0eiJBoQFaQA@mail.gmail.com> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <1971160.7GEiT5quOD@peggleto-mobl.ger.corp.intel.com>

[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 2179 bytes --]

On 12 April 2017 at 12:54, Paul Eggleton <paul.eggleton@linux.intel.com>
wrote:

> On Wednesday, 12 April 2017 7:14:00 PM NZST Jussi Kukkonen wrote:
> > On 11 April 2017 at 23:52, Martin Kelly <mkelly@xevo.com> wrote:
> > > I'm thinking about integrating the open-vm-tools recipe from
> openswitch[1]
> > > into openembedded (it massively improves the performance of VMWare
> guests)
> > > but first I have a question about licensing. The openswitch repository
> is
> > > Apache-licensed while the openembedded layers are all MIT licensed. I'm
> > > not
> > > a lawyer, but my understanding is that the Apache license is a
> superset of
> > > the MIT license (it includes a patent clause that the MIT license
> lacks),
> > > and therefore MIT code can be relicensed as Apache but not the other
> way
> > > around.
> >
> > The license of the layer refers to the licensing of the recipe files
> > themselves: the source code licenses of the projects the recipes fetch
> and
> > build are another thing. As long as the source code license is an open
> > source one there should be no complaints about integrating into an
> > openembedded layer.
> >
> > To be completely clear: The LICENSE variable in a recipe refers to the
> > source code license of the project to be built and should be set based on
> > the licensing info found within the version of source code that we fetch
> > and build. The recipe files are licensed according to the LICENSE and/or
> > COPYING files of the layer it is in.
> >
> > By the way, a quick search on layers.openembedded.org reveals this:
> > http://git.openswitch.net/cgit/openswitch/ops-build/
> tree/yocto/openswitch/me
> > ta-foss-openswitch/recipes-extended/open-vm-tools/open-
> vm-tools_10.0.5.bb
> > (it seems to think the correct license is GPL).
>
> This is muddying the waters somewhat - the LICENSE variable has nothing to
> do
> with this. We're only concerned with the license of the recipe itself.
>

Thanks Paul: I was indeed confused and did not understand this was about an
existing recipe even though it was clearly explained in the original post.
Sorry for the noise.

Jussi

[-- Attachment #2: Type: text/html, Size: 3070 bytes --]