Re: [PATCH] tcg/LICENSE: Remove no-longer-true statement that TCG is BSD-licensed

[Peter Maydell]

On Mon, 21 Oct 2019 at 17:26, Richard Henderson
<address@hidden> wrote:
>
> On 10/21/19 8:52 AM, Richard Henderson wrote:
> > On 10/21/19 7:58 AM, Peter Maydell wrote:
> >> Since 2008 the tcg/LICENSE file has not changed: it claims that
> >> everything under tcg/ is BSD-licensed.
> >>
> >> This is not true and hasn't been true for years: in 2013 we
> >> accepted the tcg/aarch64 target code under a GPLv2-or-later
> >> license statement. We don't really consider the tcg
> >> subdirectory to be a distinct part of QEMU anyway.
> >>
> >> Remove the LICENSE file, since claiming false information
> >> about the license of the code is confusing, and update
> >> the main project LICENSE file also to be clearer about
> >> the license used by TCG.
> >>
> >> Signed-off-by: Peter Maydell <address@hidden>
> >> ---
> >> This patch takes the simple approach of just documenting
> >> the de-facto current reality; does anybody want to argue
> >> for something else? Other possibilities I guess would be
> >> specifically documenting tcg/aarch64 as an accidental
> >> exception to the general licensing rule for tcg/, or even
> >> trying to get it relicensed.
> >>
> >> Does having tcg/ be BSD-licensed gain the project anything?
> >> From my point of view I don't really see it as a cleanly
> >> separable module of code -- it's quite tightly integrated
> >> with the rest of QEMU, including code in accel/tcg which
> >> is variously GPL or LGPL.
> >
> > I think this is the best solution.  I've never been convinced that TCG can
> > usefully be extracted and reused for something else.
> >
> > Reviewed-by: Richard Henderson <address@hidden>
>
> Queued to tcg-next, as I think there's a couple of other things pending.

As a licensing issue, I think it would be better to have it on-list
for review/comment by interested people for a bit longer
than that -- it's not like it really needs to get in before
the softfreeze.

thanks
-- PMM