[dpdk-dev] Licensing consistency

Neil Horman nhorman at tuxdriver.com
Thu Jun 5 20:57:01 CEST 2014


Hey all-
	One of the things that came up during the dpdk package review for Fedora
was the inconsistency of License reporting in the upstream project.  DPDK is
triple licensed, whcih isn't in and of itself a big deal, but indications of
which file(s) are under which license is fairly scattered.  For instance:

1) The kni module has a GPLv2 license at the top of each file

2) The kni MODULE_LICENSE macro indicates the license is dual BSD/GPLv2

3) The rte_kni_common.h file is licensed dual BSD/LGPL v2

4) The linux kernel modules for hardware pmds have no license file in them at
all, but do have a README which contains a BSD license (though no clear
indicator that this license applies to the files in this directory).


Theres several more examples of this, but the point is, its often not clear what
bits fall under what license.  Has any effort been made to consolodate licensing
here, or at least to make it consistent and clear where to find license
information for a file?  If not I would propose that all files in the DPDK be
required to carry the license that they are distributed under in the top of
said file, and that we add a LICENSE file to the tree root indicating that each
file contains its own licensing terms.

Thoughts?
Neil
 


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