Re: [gentoo-dev] Contributed ebuilds and copyright questions

[Rich Freeman]

On Tue, Oct 25, 2016 at 12:48 AM, Daniel Campbell <zlg@g.o> wrote:
> This made me think of another scenario; let's say I have my own fork of
> Gentoo, maintained in an overlay complete with docs, etc, under an MIT
> or BSD license, but as a Gentoo developer, I must copyright under GPL.
> Could I do such dual licensing on a case-by-case basis because (in this
> hypothetical) I'm the original author of the ebuilds?

Well, you could certainly dual-license anything you're the author of.
A complete fork of Gentoo under the BSD license would probably be
impractical though since you'd have to rewrite everything.

>
> If so, then Matt's coworker could offer the same ebuild under a
> Gentoo-friendly license and maintain copyright on Google's overlay. The
> only question at that point would be Google's own copyright policy and
> whether or not its employees own any of what they produce on company time.

The chromiumos ebuilds are already under a friendly license.  The only
issue is what to put in the copyright header.  Under the proposed new
policy the ebuilds could just be copied into the tree wholesale, since
they're already under the correct license and the chromiumos headers
would be fine under the new policy, perhaps just with the addition of
"and others" as soon as any changes get made.

If they were under a non-compatible license like the CDDL then it
would depend on whether the authors have the right to dual-license it
under the GPL, or whether Gentoo is willing to accept CDDL-licensed
ebuilds into the repository.  Part of the draft policy is that every
Gentoo project/repository have a list of accepted licenses.  Off the
top of my head I can't think of any issues with allowing incompatible
but similar copyleft licenses into the main tree.  The files
themselves are standalone, and I'm not sure to what degree the actual
built binaries inherit their copyright.  Perhaps there are some
situations where you could have bindist issues, but I suspect they
would be isolated.

I was actually chatting with somebody about the issue of package
licensing vs upstream licensing (which is an issue we don't have as
many problems with since we don't aggregate package metadata with the
actual package contents).  We didn't really talk about the licensing
of the final on-system binary which is mainly upstream-controlled but
whose installation details are influenced by the distro.

-- 
Rich