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

[Jeremy Stanley]

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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