[Ofa_boardplus] OFED license statement

[Coulter, Susan K]

There is enough concern, that it appears we need a formal vote.
This discussion and coming to a final conclusion has taken a lot longer than anyone had hoped.
Due to that delay - I would like to try an email vote.

The fact of the matter is that we cannot change reality.
One reality is the existence of GPL only code in the kernel.
The other reality is the lack of clarity in our bylaws.

Sections 2 and 13.1.A talk about “either” GPL or BSD.
Sections 16.2.a and 16.3 try to enforce the dual license nature of Open Fabrics software.
In many places we refer to “Contributors”, which are not the same as”Members".
There is some language that tries to exert control over the licensing of Contributor’s code.
We have all agreed that the horse is out of the barn on this issue with respect to kernel space.

LANL offers the following motion:

The OFA accepts the nature of the kernel space code as GPLv2 and user space as dual-licensed (GPLv2 and BSD) and approves the release of OFED 3.18-2 with the following text included in a README.license file.

"OFED is distributed as a source tarball and includes both kernel space and user space code.  The kernel space code includes a number of files that are licensed under GPLv2 only.  Therefore, the kernel space code included as part of the OFED tarball is licensed as GPLv2.  The user space code, however, is dual licensed (GPLv2 and BSD)."



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Susan Coulter / HPC-DES
Network Capability Lead
(505) 667-8425
“Once in a while you get shown the light
    In the strangest of places if you look at it right”  Robert Hunter
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