Comment by Someone | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Someone | Hacker News Reader

License is weird and unclear to me. https://github.com/revng/revng/blob/develop/LICENSE.md:

“Licensing information

Copyright (c) 2015-2017 Alessandro Di Federico <ale@clearmind.me>

Copyright (c) 2017-2020 rev.ng Labs Srl <info@rev.ng>

The project as a whole is released under the terms of the GNU General Public License, version 2. A copy of this license can be found in LICENSE.gpl.

Each individual file, unless otherwise noted, is released under the terms of the MIT License. A copy of this license can be found in LICENSE.mit.”

Does that paragraph about GPLv2 constitute a version of “unless otherwise noted”?

If so, why mention the MIT license at all?

If not, doesn’t that mean it effectively is dual licensed? If everything is GPLv2, and I take a single file, that’s still GPLv2, and if if have set of MIT licensed files and group them, the result still is MIT licensed.

(Browsing the code, all source files seem to have a MIT header, so, presumably, they mean this to beMIT licensed)

Also, it’s not “GPLv2 or later”, but I think you can take the MIT licensed files and rerelease them as GPLv3, if you’d want to (or is the attribution requirement a showstopper there?)

The qemu TCG parts that it presumably links to are GPLv2, so the combined project is GPLv2 by necessity[1]. I think that's all they're trying to get across.

[1]: apart from viral licenses being pretty much meaningless under EU copyright law

Exactly. We wanted MIT, but we were infected by the GPLv2 due to the QEMU dependency. So we licensed each file under MIT, but GPLv2 as a whole.

QEMU does something similar:

    https://github.com/qemu/qemu/blob/master/LICENSE

Aha!

I think you could phrase that better. Maybe something like “This projects builds on GPLv2-licensed code, so the project is GPLv2-licensed. If you want to use our additions in isolation, you can choose to use them as either GPLv2 or MIT licensed”?

> Each individual file, unless otherwise noted, is released under the terms of the MIT License. A copy of this license can be found in LICENSE.mit.

Worth . . . noting . . . that every file with license info says MIT; none say anything else. So the "unless otherwise noted" is purely future-proofing.

If you have a set of MIT files, and group them, the group is whatever you want it to be.

It just means someone else can take all the files and make something else with them, but they just can't redistribute the new project under the name revng, unless it conforms to gpl2.

It is dual licensed. Only the copyright holder can change the license.

IANAL, but if you fork a project and change the licence, the new license only applies to your modifications.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com