Re: licensing of intloop() in libddekit/interrupt.c

[Olaf Buddenhagen]

Hi,

> El 07/11/15 a les 12:11, Robert Millan ha escrit:

> > Unfortunately I didn't get any reply from Zheng Da. Does someone
> > know if Zheng is using another email address nowadays?

While we haven't heard from him in years, I was able to dig something up
that seems current: http://www.cs.jhu.edu/~zhengda/

The linked GitHub account ( https://github.com/icoming ) has an (empty)
subhurd repository -- so it's definitely the right guy :-) There is an
address there: dzheng5@jhu.edu

There is pretty recent activity; so it should be up to date I hope.

> > In case he can't be reached anymore, I traced origin of the
> > intloop() routine
[...]
> > With this we have "Copyright (C) 2009, 2010 Zheng Da", but still no
> > licensing information.

If you are resonably sure that the code in question was indeed added by
him, not imported, then maybe we don't even need to contact him: he
signed a copyright assignment for the Hurd of course, and I assume it
applies to this code as well -- so the copyright holder is actually the
FSF.

> > Unfortunately this gets a bit confusing: some parts of the Hurd are
> > GPLv2 and some are GPLv2+.

It should all be v2+, except for bits imported from Linux and/or DDE.

> > Then the file Zheng was modifying [1] is imported from DDE/L4 which
> > is GPLv2 [2].
[...]
> > What should we make of this? It's somewhat relevant as the code will
> > be linked into librumpdev_pci, which in turn will be linked by its
> > final users in the application layer.

By default we can assume that the added code carries the same licensing
terms as the rest of the file, i.e. GPLv2 only. There certainly should
be no problem getting permission from the FSF to distribute it under v2+
terms; and considering it's nothing strategic, I'm pretty sure we could
also get a permissive license, if we think this is preferable to match
the rest of librump...

(I don't know how the code fits together though -- it *might* be
preferable to actually put the Hurd interface part into a library in the
Hurd repository, which is what Antti suggested I think...)

-antrik-