[dm-devel] What license is multipath-tools under

[Ritesh Raj Sarraf]

Hello James,

On Thu, 2016-07-28 at 13:26 -0400, James Bottomley wrote:
> On Thu, 2016-07-28 at 22:23 +0530, Ritesh Raj Sarraf wrote:
> > Thanks Xose, for digging this information. But shouldn't this 
> > information go into respective source files?
> 
> If there's a COPYING file, there's no need for individual files to have
> a copyright.  The licence of the file defaults to whatever COPYING (or
> LICENCE or some recognizable top level file says).  A significant
> number of Linux Kernel files don't have individual file header copyrigh
> ts, if you want an example of this.

Yes. But as I understand, the entire Linux [1] code base is GPLv2 only. Whereas
in case of multipath-tools, as Xose mentioned in the previous email, it is a mix
of:

* GPLv2 (only?)
* GPLv2+
* LGPLv2

Having this information in the source repository (not necessarily as individual
source headers) will speak out much clear.

I think something like Debian's Machine-readable copyright format will be a good
fit in this case.

https://www.debian.org/doc/packaging-manuals/copyright-format/1.0/

An example project, with mixed licenses:
http://metadata.ftp-master.debian.org/changelogs/main/libs/libstoragemgmt/unstab
le_copyright

BTW, this topic hit my mind 2 days ago when I looked at the aging (old format)
multipath-tools/debian/copyright in my packaging repo and wanted to fix it.

http://metadata.ftp-master.debian.org/changelogs/main/m/multipath-tools/unstable
_copyright



I have attached a patch for a copyright file, based on what Xose had mentioned
in the email. There still are files, like libmultipath/prioritizers/alua.c,
which mention the license as plain GPL. So, this patch is still not complete.


[1] with some minor exceptions I just noticed.

-- 
Ritesh Raj Sarraf | http://people.debian.org/~rrs
Debian - The Universal Operating System
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