[pisa] PISA licensing status
- From: Diego Biurrun <diego@xxxxxxxxxx>
- To: pisa@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Mon, 22 Jun 2009 15:44:36 +0200
Hi everybody, after some recent discussions about software licensing
with Tobias, I started investigating the current licensing situation of
the PISA source base. Unsurprisingly, we currently have a wild mix of
different licenses, namely:
- GPL version 2 (or later)
- LGPL version 2.1 (or later)
- BSD 3 clause
- no licensing information
Most notably we include libconfig, which is LGPL version 2.1 or later.
So any licensing terms we choose must be compatible with the weak
copyleft of the LGPL.
However, we use the following two files, which are under the GPL (any
version):
trunk/include/iwlib.h
trunk/libpisa/iwlib.c
As long as we keep using these two, all of PISA is GPL.
Then there is trunk/include/wireless.h, which states
* Copyright (c) 1997-2005 Jean Tourrilhes, All Rights Reserved.
That's not good. It's just a bunch of #defines and structure
definitions though, which makes it questionable if the file is
copyrightable at all. Since it is part of the Linux kernel, I think we
can assume that it is supposed to be GPL.
The BSD 3 clause license headers we use contain the following line:
* DISCLAIMED. IN NO EVENT SHALL <copyright holder> BE LIABLE FOR ANY
Somebody misunderstood what placeholders are supposed to be for or
treated 20 lines of licensing information like a binary blob that is
copied around, but never read. I'm not sure what is worse...
Another highlight is trunk/performance/pisaperf.c. It starts with a 3
clause BSD license header but then has the following Doxygen comment:
* \note Distributed under <a
href="http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl.txt";>GNU/GPL</a>.
So what's it going to be?
Another oddity is trunk/tools/tunnel/screamer.c, which has the following
header:
/*
* scream.c
*
* Created on: 26.08.2008
* Author: heer
*/
/*
* alphaClient.cpp
* alpha
*
* Created by Tobias Heer on 10.04.08.
* Copyright 2008 __MyCompanyName__. All rights reserved.
*
*/
This seems like a mistake, i.e. it seems that the second block should
not be there at all, but the 'All rights reserved.' phrase poses some
difficulty. No redistribution of any sort is allowed for this code.
Also, the file looks very much like trunk/tools/screamer.c.
Possibly one of them should be removed.
So in summary, it's quite a mess. Nothing surprising there, most
projects seem to be...
Diego
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