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

[Betsy Zeller]

Roland - thanks for reading carefully and responding quickly. I should
point out again that I am not a lawyer. It would be incorrect for me to
state which of these files needs to have a copyright. (In fact, I did
start to go through and cull the list before I sent it, then decided
that this would be a bad idea for the reasons stated above). It's worth
noting that under international law, any file without a copyright has an
implied proprietary copyright, which means it should be only edited by
its original author. As I mentioned in the initial message, I'd be happy
for us to make a proposal to only require copyrights in headers files,
source files, and Makefiles, but OpenFabrics as an organization has to
agree to this policy.

On Wed, 2006-05-24 at 07:51 -0700, Roland Dreier wrote:
> 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?
I can't answer for Debian's decision on this. My understanding is that
particular style of copyright is explicitly proprietary. 

> 
> 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?
We can choose to leave this and other such files with no copyright, and
thus legally proprietary, but it should be an explicit decision. 

> 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.

You are correct - the libibverbs do reference COPYING files correctly,
and shouldn't have been included in this list. 

However, some additional uses of COPYING are not so successful.
 In both the cases below, there are multiples files named COPYING inside
the same directory structure, and in both cases there are examples of
COPYING files which are self referential. This seems ambiguous at best,
and probably not what was intended.

1) 
    ./src/userspace/management/COPYING
        - full licenses
    ./src/userspace/management/osm/COPYING
        - standard text referring to COPYING (recursion)

2)
    ./ofed/ibutils/COPYING
        - recursion.  This refers to COPYING and it is the highest level
          thing in the current tree.
    ./ofed/ibutils/ibis/COPYING
        - standard text refering to COPYING (recursion)
    ./ofed/ibutils/ibdm/COPYING
        - GPL full text only
    ./ofed/ibutils/ibmgtsim/COPYING
        - GPL full text only

Regards, Betsy

-- 
Betsy Zeller
Director of Software Engineering
QLogic Corporation
System Interconnect Group
(formerly PathScale, Inc)
2071 Stierlin Court, Suite 200
Mountain View, CA, 94043
1-650-934-8088