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Re: sunrpc licensing


On Wed, Aug 7, 2013 at 12:36 PM, Carlos O'Donell
<carlos@systemhalted.org> wrote:
> On Wed, Aug 7, 2013 at 1:22 AM, Nicholas Mills <nlmills@g.clemson.edu> wrote:
>> Under what license is the file sunrpc/xdr.c? Is it covered solely by
>> the Oracle license at the top of the file or are the modifications
>> covered also by the GPL? In short, if I copied the file sunrpc/xdr.c
>> into my software product am bound by the requirements of the GPL?
>
> That's a very interesting question.
>
> Even as an FSF steward of the glibc project I'm not entirely aware of
> the history of all of the donated code to the project.
>
> I'd be happy to document the history if someone like Roland is willing
> to recount some of it. I can put it up on the FAQ and create a history
> page for the project on the wiki.

The git history isn't too enlightening and the process wasn't very
transparent to the community:

http://sourceware.org/git/?p=glibc.git;a=history;f=sunrpc/xdr.c;h=b3f96ca4dc2f9a41183a23bbb4c7b5b7f62fb0bc;hb=HEAD

But these are the relevant commits:

--------

>From a7ab6ec83e144dafdc7c46b8943288f450f8e320 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001
From: Ulrich Drepper <drepper@redhat.com>
Date: Thu, 19 Aug 2010 10:38:55 -0700
Subject: [PATCH] Once again change RPC copyright notices.

According to email from Wim Coekaerts.

--------

>From cb636bb25544c7f4d23a454ca79bb9d75d1583a3 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001
From: Ulrich Drepper <drepper@redhat.com>
Date: Sun, 27 Jun 2010 19:34:03 -0700
Subject: [PATCH] Revert "Sun agreed to a change of the license for the
RPC code to a BSD-like license."

This reverts commit ab09b221594f12d90a63d29cbf5488d91f39d3f3.

The lawyers now say the copy in glibc isn't contained in the
agreement.

--------

>From ab09b221594f12d90a63d29cbf5488d91f39d3f3 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001
From: Ulrich Drepper <drepper@redhat.com>
Date: Wed, 20 May 2009 21:57:37 -0700
Subject: [PATCH] Sun agreed to a change of the license for the RPC
code to a BSD-like license.

--------

I suspect that the license change was approved by the FSF and now the
file(s) are exclusively covered by the Oracle license, and not subject
to additional LGPL v2.1 restrictions.

Someone from licensing@fsf.org should probably comment if Roland
doesn't have an answer.

Ryan S. Arnold


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