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

[Anthony Liguori]

Paolo Bonzini <address@hidden> writes:

>> > >>>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?

Guys, we'll fixup the copyright in the next round of patches.  I can't
talk publicly about our internal policies around copyright assignment
and licensing or else I would.

Just ignore the copyrights in this series as they are bogus for all
intents and purposes.

Regards,

Anthony Liguori

>
> Paolo