Bug#506040: Unclear licensing on some files
Hi Sage,
I've been reviewing the package, and I'm almost done. However, there are
some issues with the licensing that may prevent it from entering Debian
and/or Ubuntu's archive:
src/client/fuse.cc has this header:
/*
* Ceph - scalable distributed file system * * Copyright (C) 2004-2006
Sage Weil <sage@newdream.net> * * This is free software; you can
redistribute it and/or * modify it under the terms of the GNU Lesser
General Public * License version 2.1, as published by the Free Software
* Foundation. See file COPYING. * */
/*
FUSE: Filesystem in Userspace Copyright (C) 2001-2005 Miklos Szeredi
<miklos@szeredi.hu>
This program can be distributed under the terms of the GNU GPL.
See the file COPYING.
*/
Since the file was originally under the GPL, I believe it cannot not be
re-licensed to the LGPL 2.1 in this way without Miklos assigning copyright
to you or granting you special permission to relicense the file. This
would actually require the entire client to be re-licensed to the GPL.
This appears to be a copy of the example/fusexmp.c file from the fuse
distribution. Assuming it came from v2.4.2 (the last one to have the
2005 Copyright), I think you've changed it enough to justify removing
Miklos' copyright:
clint@ubuntu:~/pkg/ceph/scratch/fuse-2.4.2$ diff -u
example/fusexmp.c ../../bzr/ceph/src/client/fuse.cc | grep
'^-'|wc -l 261 clint@ubuntu:~/pkg/ceph/scratch/fuse-2.4.2$ diff -u
example/fusexmp.c ../../bzr/ceph/src/client/fuse.cc | grep '^+'|wc -l
214 clint@ubuntu:~/pkg/ceph/scratch/fuse-2.4.2$ wc -l example/fusexmp.c
353 example/fusexmp.c
So, you've changed 261 lines of 353. That is 73.9%. I think in some
countries that constitutes enough change to remove the original copyright,
but its not clear enough to pass Debian's Free Source Guidelines. You'd
probably be better off just obtaining permission from Miklos to re-license
that file as LGPL, or simply re-licensing the 'cfuse' source files under
the GPLv2 (which is what version of the GPL fuse 2.4.2 is distributed
under). Since it is a binary program, and not a library, it makes
sense anyway.
Anyway, hopefully we can get that licensing issue cleared up quickly so
ceph makes it into the 10.10 release of Ubuntu.
Otherwise the package looks good. I've just changed a few things. Its
all stored in a branch on launchpad here:
https://code.launchpad.net/~clint-fewbar/+junk/ceph-packaging
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