[Ofa_boardplus] OpenFabrics Alliance XWG Meeting Minutes from 9 May 2019

[Doug Ledford]

On Thu, 2019-05-09 at 15:05 -0300, Jason Gunthorpe wrote:
> Generally speaking a non-profit should have a clear policy what license
> it will use on work produced under the umbrella of that project.

If they were intending to man projects on their own, then that would be
a concern.  But the last project the OFA attempted to man via promoter
donated man hours was the EWG/OFED, and people agree that this is
winding down and planning to go away.  The OFA must decide if it's going
to try and do that sort of thing again, or do like it did with OFIWG,
which was be a supportive organization, but leave it up to the community
to actually create and man the project.  If we land on the latter, then
we won't have our own license policy because we won't be setting the
license on any projects (well, to be more accurate, we won't have a
software license policy, there might be other assets that we should
still have a license policy around, such as marketing materials or
such).  But, I would recommend that if it's possible we create a project
under our umbrella, that we stick with the dual license GPL/BSD.  This
seems perfectly acceptable for user space, and I don't see us starting
our own kernel, so that should resolve that issue.

> Companies want to see this so they have clear comfort that work they
> contribute will not be hijacked by other company's licenses.
> 
> As an example a company that contributes to a BSD licensed project may
> not like it if the project then turns around and accepts GPL code,
> effectively re-licensing the whole thing to be GPL.
> 
> Also, license proliferation and unusual terms are a problem. Both
> libfabric and rdma-core (past) have a wide range of licenses which is
> not productive for anyone.
> 
> Jason
> 
> On Thu, May 09, 2019 at 05:52:54PM +0000, Aguilar, Michael J. via Ofa_boardplus wrote:
> >    Everyone
> > 
> > 
> >    The XWG meeting consisted of the introduction of a new, potential,
> >    Open-Source Software policy and a new ByLaw for protection of member
> >    Intellectual Property.
> > 
> > 
> >    Mike
> > _______________________________________________
> > Ofa_boardplus mailing list
> > Ofa_boardplus at lists.openfabrics.org
> > https://lists.openfabrics.org/mailman/listinfo/ofa_boardplus
> 
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-- 
Doug Ledford <dledford at redhat.com>
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