On 12 April 2017 at 12:54, Paul Eggleton wrote: > On Wednesday, 12 April 2017 7:14:00 PM NZST Jussi Kukkonen wrote: > > On 11 April 2017 at 23:52, Martin Kelly 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