[lxc-devel] Clarifying the licensing of LXC

[Stéphane Graber]

Hello,

First of all, sorry for the boring e-mail, nobody likes to deal with
licenses but it's an unfortunate thing we have to deal with from time to
time.

Thomas Moschny reported some inconsistencies in the way LXC is currently
licensed.
The bug report is available here: https://github.com/lxc/lxc/issues/36


Basically the way I see it, LXC is made of 4 different bits:
 - The main library
 - The language bindings
 - The binary tools/scripts
 - The templates

In order to make the library easily usable by others, LXC was originally
licensed entirely under the LGPL v2.1 and higher and that certainly
makes sense for any bit in the main library as well as for the bindings.

Most of the tools, scripts and templates followed course and are also
under LGPLv2.1+, some are under GPLv2 and that's all fine since they're
tools and not libraries.


The problem is that we currently have some files that are part of the
library or part of bindings which are licensed under the wrong license,
namely, they're currently under GPLv2.

I believe this was an oversight and that we should get those switched to
the proper license immediately. But I'm not simply going to go ahead and
do that myself since I'm not the actual copyright holder for those.

Instead, I'd like the original/main author of those to confirm it's fine
by them and then we can do that.


This still means we'll effectively re-license the code of some of our
contributors without explicitly asking them about it. As I said, I'm
convinced that this isn't a problem since we're just talking about a
handful of files and it's always been clear that the LXC library is
licensed under LGPLv2.1+.

Nevertheless, if anyone contributed to one of those files we're about to
re-license and do not wish their contributions re-licensed, please get
in touch as soon as possible so we can remove the affected code from the
project.


The following files will be re-licensed from GPLv2 to LGPLv2.1+:
 - src/lua-lxc/core.c (Dwight)
 - src/lxc/lxccontainer.c (Serge)
 - src/lxc/lxclock.c (Serge)
 - src/lxc/lxclock.h (Serge)
 - src/tests/cgpath.c (Serge)
 - src/tests/containertests.c (Serge)
 - src/tests/createtest.c (Serge)
 - src/tests/destroytest.c (Serge)
 - src/tests/getkeys.c (Serge)
 - src/tests/get_item.c (Serge)
 - src/tests/locktests.c (Serge)
 - src/tests/lxcpath.c (Serge)
 - src/tests/saveconfig.c (Serge)
 - src/tests/shutdowntest.c (Serge)
 - src/tests/startone.c (Serge)
 - templates/lxc-ubuntu.in (Serge)
 - templates/lxc-ubuntu-cloud.in (Serge)

Any file that currently doesn't contain a licensing header is assumed to
be under the LGPLv2.1+ (as specified in COPYING).


Additionally, some of the Android compatibility bits under lxc/includes/
are licensed under a two-clause BSD license. To the best of my
knowledge, there are no restrictions in linking LGPLv2 code to BSD code.


While processing that bug report, I've also noticed some cases where our
license headers are out of date (wrong FSF address) or inconsistent (in
the form, not the content). I'll be fixing those too before I send the
alpha1 pull-request.

-- 
Stéphane Graber
Ubuntu developer
http://www.ubuntu.com
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