Re: [Qemu-devel] [PATCH] slirp: clarify license of slirp as BSD-3

[Eric Blake]

On 3/13/19 7:38 AM, Marc-André Lureau wrote:
> In order to make slirp a standalone project, the project must have a
> clear license, and be compatible with the GPL or LGPL.
> 
> Since commit 2f5f89963186d42a7ded253bc6cf5b32abb45cec ("Remove the
> advertising clause from the slirp license"), slirp is BSD-3. But new
> files have been added under slirp/ with QEMU GPL license since then.
> 
> The copyright holders have been asked to relicense files to BSD-3:

Can you please split this into JUST the relicensing of the affected
files, and THEN the change to SPDX tags, rather than squashing it all in
one?

> +++ b/slirp/src/ip.h
> @@ -1,33 +1,7 @@
> +/* SPDX-License-Identifier: BSD-3-Clause */
>  /*
>   * Copyright (c) 1982, 1986, 1993
> - *   The Regents of the University of California.  All rights reserved.
> - *
> - * Redistribution and use in source and binary forms, with or without

> - * ip.h,v 1.3 1994/08/21 05:27:30 paul Exp
> + * The Regents of the University of California.  All rights reserved.

Is 'All rights reserved' really compatible with open source? It's one
thing to say 'All rights reserved' and then proceed to list exceptions;
but when the exceptions are no longer directly visible (but hidden
behind the SPDX tag), I have to wonder if the file is still open source.
Can we get an opinion from a lawyer (perhaps Red Hat legal) on whether
the phrase 'All rights reserved' can be safely removed from all of these
files as part of the licensing cleanup?

I absolutely frown on users that mix GPL and 'All rights reserved', but
when it comes to BSD, there is enough copy-and-paste mess that uses it
that I know I'm fighting an uphill battle, so I'm less prone to reject
patches that mix BSD and 'All rights reserved'.  Still, as this is a
clean start, we might as well get it right, if we can.

-- 
Eric Blake, Principal Software Engineer
Red Hat, Inc.           +1-919-301-3226
Virtualization:  qemu.org | libvirt.org

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