On 04/12/2017 03:50 AM, Jussi Kukkonen wrote:


On 12 April 2017 at 12:54, Paul Eggleton <[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:

    On Wednesday, 12 April 2017 7:14:00 PM NZST Jussi Kukkonen wrote:
    > On 11 April 2017 at 23:52, Martin Kelly <[email protected] 
<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
    > > I'm thinking about integrating the open-vm-tools recipe from 
openswitch[1]
    > > into openembedded (it massively improves the performance of VMWare 
guests)
    > > but first I have a question about licensing. The openswitch repository 
is
    > > Apache-licensed while the openembedded layers are all MIT licensed. I'm
    > > not
    > > a lawyer, but my understanding is that the Apache license is a superset 
of
    > > the MIT license (it includes a patent clause that the MIT license 
lacks),
    > > and therefore MIT code can be relicensed as Apache but not the other way
    > > around.
    >
    > The license of the layer refers to the licensing of the recipe files
    > themselves: the source code licenses of the projects the recipes fetch and
    > build are another thing. As long as the source code license is an open
    > source one there should be no complaints about integrating into an
    > openembedded layer.
    >
    > To be completely clear: The LICENSE variable in a recipe refers to the
    > source code license of the project to be built and should be set based on
    > the licensing info found within the version of source code that we fetch
    > and build. The recipe files are licensed according to the LICENSE and/or
    > COPYING files of the layer it is in.
    >
    > By the way, a quick search on layers.openembedded.org 
<http://layers.openembedded.org> reveals this:
    > 
http://git.openswitch.net/cgit/openswitch/ops-build/tree/yocto/openswitch/me
    
<http://git.openswitch.net/cgit/openswitch/ops-build/tree/yocto/openswitch/me>
    > ta-foss-openswitch/recipes-extended/open-vm-tools/open-vm-tools_10.0.5.bb
    <http://open-vm-tools_10.0.5.bb>
    > (it seems to think the correct license is GPL).

    This is muddying the waters somewhat - the LICENSE variable has
    nothing to do
    with this. We're only concerned with the license of the recipe itself.



Thanks Paul: I was indeed confused and did not understand this was about
an existing recipe even though it was clearly explained in the original
post. Sorry for the noise.

Jussi

Right, I should have clarified. The underlying code is LGPLv2/GPLv2, but the recipe file itself is Apache licensed, which is my concern.

It sounds like I should ask openswitch for relicensing first. If they say no, we can consider the situation further.
--
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