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Message-ID: <20160316103125.GB9862@port70.net> Date: Wed, 16 Mar 2016 11:31:25 +0100 From: Szabolcs Nagy <nsz@...t70.net> To: musl@...ts.openwall.com Subject: Re: musl licensing * Rich Felker <dalias@...c.org> [2016-03-15 18:41:26 -0400]: > On Tue, Mar 15, 2016 at 02:59:24PM -0700, Petr Hosek wrote: > > The first issue is the lack of clarity around per-file licensing and > > copyright attribution. > > It's always been my intent to be document copyright status of the > various parts of musl in detail in the COPYRIGHT file. If adding > one-line notices to non-trivial source files would help gain > acceptence by lawyers, I don't think that would be terribly > controversial. there should be a way to document copyright without changing source files. if google has some best practice for that we can follow it i think. (one line comment is ok, but i'd prefer no license related text in source files.) > > The other issue is the claim that some files > > (in particular, the public headers and C runtime) are in the public > > domain. While this might be technically correct, it's not legally > > sound and we would be legally unable to use these files without them > > being placed under copyright and an open source license. The most > > appropriate way of addressing both issues would be to include a > > copyright notice in individual source and header files. > > As far as the public headers, it's my view that the vast majority do > not contain any copyrightable original content. For the standard > interfaces they all just match the interface requirements of ISO C and > POSIX; only some specific type definitions and numeric constants are > implementation-specific, and these are just minimal factual > definitions matching ABIs/kernel. Some places have a very small amount > of what you might call 'code' in public headers, but they're all the > obvious/only way to express what they're doing, not anything creative. bionic actually generates its kernel interface headers from (gpl) code and each file has the comment: *** This header was automatically generated from a Linux kernel header *** of the same name, to make information necessary for userspace to *** call into the kernel available to libc. It contains only constants, *** structures, and macros generated from the original header, and thus, *** contains no copyrightable information. so it is ok to claim 'not copyrightable', we just have to find a way to do this without cluttering each header file. > > address these issues. We believe that our company's interpretation of > > the copyright and authorship is the same across the entire industry i don't believe that. > > license). Furthermore, all past and future contributors will have to > > to sign the Contributor License Agreement (CLA). Since the majority of > > musl authors are present in this forum, we're reaching out to you to > > ask whether this is something you would agree with and also to start > > the discussion within the wider musl community. > > I don't think anything CLA-like is acceptable to our community. All > the evidence points to it being a huge barrier to entry for new > contributors. There is plenty of documentation of development process > in the git log and on the mailing list to show that our contributors > are submitting code with the intent that it be used in musl under the > project's license. linux kernel uses Signed-off-by: in commit messages for this https://git.kernel.org/cgit/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/tree/Documentation/SubmittingPatches?id=refs/tags/v4.5#n416 i think even that's superfluous (the Author: is already there we just have to document what it means) ideally anonymous contributions would work too in some way.
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