[openfabrics-ewg] Copyright review of OpenFabrics (user space)

[Roland Dreier]

With all due respect, generating a list like this without using a
little common sense generates too much noise to be useful.  For
example, what makes the (8-line Makefile)

    branches/1.0/src/userspace/libmthca/debian/rules

proprietary?  If the Debian project, which is very careful about
proper licensing, is willing to ship that file, is there really any
reason to think that there is a license problem with it?

Also, your list includes files like

    branches/1.0/src/userspace/libibverbs/debian/compat

as "No copyright (legally proprietary)."  That file is 2 bytes long --
it has the character "5" and a newline.  Would you seriously expect a
copyright notice and license included in that file?

In fact all the files in the libibverbs tree are clearly covered by
the COPYING file in that tree.  Certainly the standard for software is
_not_ that every file in every package must include a copyright.

As an experiment, on my Ubuntu workstation, I ran the following
commands:

    find /usr/share/doc -name "*READ*"|xargs zgrep -i --files-without-match copyri|wc
    find /usr/share/doc -name "*READ*"|xargs zgrep -i -l|wc

This showed that there are 1285 README-like files without any
copyright, and only 304 that contain the string "copyri" (which may
not actually have been part of a copyright notice).

If we really want to spend time on this, let's try to get a little
more signal and a little less noise from any audit that we do.

 - R.