Re: Relicensing an Apache-licensed recipe as MIT

[Martin Kelly <mkelly@xevo.com>]

On 04/12/2017 03:50 AM, Jussi Kukkonen wrote:
>
>
> On 12 April 2017 at 12:54, Paul Eggleton <paul.eggleton@linux.intel.com
> <mailto: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 <mailto: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 <http://layers.openembedded.org> reveals this:
>     > http://git.openswitch.net/cgit/openswitch/ops-build/tree/yocto/openswitch/me
>     <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
>     <http://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

Right, I should have clarified. The underlying code is LGPLv2/GPLv2, but 
the recipe file itself is Apache licensed, which is my concern.

It sounds like I should ask openswitch for relicensing first. If they 
say no, we can consider the situation further.