Please add a top-level license file to this project
mbrukman opened this issue · comments
First, thank you for sharing this project with us!
I see that various files have their own license headers or designations
in the file, but there isn't a single overall license specified for the project.
E.g., some files have the MIT license header:
Lines 2 to 21 in 9544739
some say "Dual MIT/GPL":
Line 300 in 9544739
and the above designations are within the same file, so it's a bit confusing.
Could you please add an explicit LICENSE file to the repo so that it's clear
under what terms the project overall is provided, and under what terms user
contributions are licensed?
Thanks!
hi @mbrukman, thank you for being interested =). This project is mostly licensed as MIT (unless a specific file says otherwise); but we also allow it to be distributed under GPL (especially to be linked into the Linux kernel, that's why we have MODULE_LICENSE("Dual MIT/GPL");; please see [1]).
Could you please add an explicit LICENSE file to the repo so that it's clear
under what terms the project overall is provided, (...)
Sure, perhaps we can use klibc's LICENSE file as a template, indicating that we might have licenses specified by individual files. What do you think? Something like this:
This license applies to all files in directory and its subdirectories,
unless otherwise noted in individual files.
For all remaining files, the following license applies:
* Copyright (c) 2024 ring-0 Ltda.
*
* Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining
* a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the
* "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including
* without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish,
* distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to
* permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to
* the following conditions:
*
* The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be
* included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.
*
* THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND,
* EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF
* MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT.
* IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY
* CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT,
* TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE
* SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.
(...) and under what terms user contributions are licensed?
Contributors might license new modules (e.g., bindings) with their license of choice (as long as it's GPL-compatible). We'd prefer permissive licenses such as MIT or BSD, but one is welcome to contribute with new modules under GPL. Of course, the contributor should mind the license of the individual file as well. For instance, we use klibc for setjmp/longjmp and it's mainly under BSD license. If one wants to contribute to those files, BSD license will apply to the patch.