[yocto] Relicensing an Apache-licensed recipe as MIT

[Jussi Kukkonen]

On 11 April 2017 at 23:52, Martin Kelly <mkelly at xevo.com> wrote:

> Hi,
>
> I'm thinking about integrating the open-vm-tools recipe from openswitch[1]
> into openembedded (it massively improves the performance of VMWare guests)
> but first I have a question about licensing. The openswitch repository is
> Apache-licensed while the openembedded layers are all MIT licensed. I'm not
> a lawyer, but my understanding is that the Apache license is a superset of
> the MIT license (it includes a patent clause that the MIT license lacks),
> and therefore MIT code can be relicensed as Apache but not the other way
> around.
>

The license of the layer refers to the licensing of the recipe files
themselves: the source code licenses of the projects the recipes fetch and
build are another thing. As long as the source code license is an open
source one there should be no complaints about integrating into an
openembedded layer.

To be completely clear: The LICENSE variable in a recipe refers to the
source code license of the project to be built and should be set based on
the licensing info found within the version of source code that we fetch
and build. The recipe files are licensed according to the LICENSE and/or
COPYING files of the layer it is in.

By the way, a quick search on layers.openembedded.org reveals this:
http://git.openswitch.net/cgit/openswitch/ops-build/tree/yocto/openswitch/meta-foss-openswitch/recipes-extended/open-vm-tools/open-vm-tools_10.0.5.bb
(it seems to think the correct license is GPL).

   Jussi
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