[Rust-VMM] Licensing Issue in rust-vmm crates

[Andreea Florescu]

Gerry, Rob, Sebastien, what do you think about this?
I would like to go ahead with the license change to Apache 2.0 OR
BSD-3-Clause and it would be great to also get an ACK from you.

Thanks,
Andreea

On Thu, Jun 30, 2022 at 10:01 AM Andreea Florescu <
andreea.florescu15 at gmail.com> wrote:

> I just wanted to clarify something as well, I do not feel strongly about
> changing the license to BSD-3-Clause, we can also use Apache 2.0 OR
> BSD-3-Clause if that makes sense. My interest is to fix the problem
> initially reported which significantly limits the usefulness of this
> project as it cannot be used by projects like QEMU.
> As most contributions are coming from Google (indirectly), Amazon, Intel
> and Alibaba, it would be really helpful to also get input on updating the
> license from the folks that are contributing from the respective companies.
> From the Amazon side of things, we discussed this internally and we're
> onboard with the change.
>
> Thanks,
> Andreea
>
> On Thu, Jun 23, 2022 at 1:48 AM Jeremy Stanley <fungi at yuggoth.org> wrote:
>
>> On 2022-06-22 17:30:37 +0100 (+0100), Alberto Faria wrote:
>> [...]
>> > I may be misunderstanding this, but it sounds like you're assuming
>> > that Apache-2.0 is a superset of BSD-3-clause in terms of user
>> > obligations. I have no idea if this is actually the case or not, but
>> > if it is, then "Apache-2.0 OR BSD-3-clause" == "BSD-3-clause", which
>> > in a sense contradicts the wide use of the former in Rust crates.
>> [...]
>>
>> I'm not a lawyer, but my long-time understanding has been that when
>> you distribute software under "license x or license y" that allows
>> people who are receiving and possibly redistributing and deriving
>> that software to do so based on their choice of either license.
>> Blanket statements like this are rarely helpful however when the
>> software consists of parts under different licenses, such as
>> shipping some files under BSD-3-clause and other files under
>> Apache-2.0 as part of the same project. Under those circumstances,
>> the sum total of the software is effectively held to the union of
>> the requirements for both licenses, but for permissive-style
>> licenses like these it's also not expected that the licenses of some
>> files impact the licenses of the other files, so long as the chosen
>> licenses have compatible terms (permissive-style licenses do not
>> require you to distribute derivative works under the same terms).
>>
>> The situation changes dramatically when copyleft-style licenses are
>> involved, since they often (as is the case with GPL for example)
>> convey transitive requirements which forbid additional licensing
>> requirements on the complete work and require redistribution under
>> the same license instead.
>>
>> As for whether Apache-2.0 is a superset of BSD-3-clause, that's
>> implied by its ancestry, since the original Apache license was
>> effectively a direct copy of BSD-4-clause, and then for Apache-1.1
>> the authors dropped the advertising clause that Berkeley had also
>> dropped, making it then equivalent to BSD-3-clause. Apache-2.0 is a
>> superset of the requirements of Apache-1.1 (and so BSD-3-clause) as
>> it merely adds a grant of patent license to the original terms.
>> --
>> Jeremy Stanley
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>>
>
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