[Qemu-devel] licensing of IBM contributions to QEMU (was Re: [PULL v4 08/11] rdma: core logic)

[Paolo Bonzini]

> > >>>I'm guessing you need approval from Jiuxing Liu for this,
> > >>>pls make him ack license change.
> > >>He approves. He doesn't work for IBM anymore.
> > >Does he approve version 2 or version 2 or later?
> > >
> > 
> > It doesn't matter - his contributions were made at IBM and he
> > doesn't work for IBM anymore.
> 
> It's considered polite not to ignore author's wishes wrt licensing.
> It's best to contact and get the ack if possible.  If not, please tell
> the list and we'll consider the options.

There are three cases:

- relicensing to something less restrictive, employer agrees on more 
liberal license, employee doesn't.  The employer's choice wins.  There
are certainly RH employees that would prefer v2 and no later version,
but we are still releasing all RH changes as GPLv2+.

- relicensing to something less restrictive, no employer (or employer
lets the employee choose the license).  Here you *must* contact the
employee.

- relicensing to something compatible but more restrictive (e.g.
BSD -> GPL).  No legal obligation to contact the author (his contributions
would still be available on the older license, all you get by contacting
the author is that you can remove the BSD terms from the file), but it
is indeed more polite to do so.


I'm pretty sure that IBM cares about licensing, but I don't know what
their global policy is.  Surely they didn't do a full grant of their
contributions to GPLv2+ (which RH and a bunch of other people did),
but if _new_ IBM contributions are to be GPLv2+, there is no need to
contact Jiuxing Liu.  Anthony?

Paolo