Re: [Qemu-devel] [Qemu-block] [PATCH 02/18] xen: introduce new 'XenBus' and 'XenDevice' object hierarchy

[Paul Durrant]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Eric Blake [mailto:address@hidden
> Sent: 28 November 2018 17:01
> To: Paul Durrant <address@hidden>; 'Kevin Wolf'
> <address@hidden>
> Cc: Stefano Stabellini <address@hidden>; Eduardo Habkost
> <address@hidden>; address@hidden; Michael S. Tsirkin
> <address@hidden>; address@hidden; Paolo Bonzini
> <address@hidden>; Anthony Perard <address@hidden>; xen-
> address@hidden; Richard Henderson <address@hidden>
> Subject: Re: [Qemu-devel] [Qemu-block] [PATCH 02/18] xen: introduce new
> 'XenBus' and 'XenDevice' object hierarchy
> 
> On 11/28/18 10:26 AM, Paul Durrant wrote:
> 
> >>> +++ b/hw/xen/xen-bus.c
> >>> @@ -0,0 +1,125 @@
> >>> +/*
> >>> + * Copyright (c) Citrix Systems Inc.
> >>> + * All rights reserved.
> >>> + */
> >>
> >> This doesn't look very compatible with the GPL. In fact it might even
> >> make it illegal for the QEMU project to distribute this code. :-)
> >>
> >> Other files you add throughout the series seem to have the same
> problem.
> >>
> >
> > I was working on the assumption that a lack of explicit license meant
> that the overall project license as described in item 2 in LICENSE. Did I
> misinterpret that text?
> 
> No, but you missed the fact that "All rights reserved" is an explicit
> license (or rather, an explicit anti-license that states you are not
> granting rights that the GPL would normally grant), and an implicit
> license does not apply when an explicit (anti-)license is present.
> 
> What's more, relying on implicit licenses is prone to misinterpretation,
> so even though the overall project documentation tries to cover what
> will happen, it's much nicer if you DO use an explicit license mention
> in your file so that we don't HAVE to rely on the implicit license.
> 
> Yes, the phrase "All rights reserved" exists in several existing files:
> 
> $ git grep -il 'all rights reserved' |wc
>      138     138    3557
> 
> but we should be striving to clean those up, not adding to the mess.

Ok. I'll send a v2 with the "All rights reserved" removed from and a GPL 
statement added to all the new files.

  Paul

> 
> --
> Eric Blake, Principal Software Engineer
> Red Hat, Inc.           +1-919-301-3266
> Virtualization:  qemu.org | libvirt.org