Intel lawyers blocked golang crypto speedup patch

Eh, after reading the mailing list this seems like an odd title.

From what I gather from what I read, Intel did not want to re-license/dual-license their Apache licensed code under the 'Go-license', and the Go project want all the code in the repo to be under said 'Go-license' and won't accept it otherwise.

So blaming one party here makes no sense to me, or did I miss something ?

I'm not sure the not title here is telling the whole story. It appears from reading the post that the developer who submitted the patch included code that Intel wrote for openssl, and it licensed under the Apache 2 license. Part of the Apache 2 license is that the existing copyright statements have to stay in place.

Then the people commenting on the patch stated that they felt that the imposition of requiring that anyone using the library would need to include the Intel copyright statements would be too much [0].

It appears that someone asked Intel to relicense the code under the golang CLA. However, Intel declined to do that, which seems reasonable. Intel wrote the code, and owns the copyright on the code, asking for attribution (and again the code is released under the very lenient Apache 2 license) doesn't seem to be too much to ask.

tl;dr Intel wrote some code and licensed it under Apache 2, but some people in the golang list don't like the attribution requirement (or having multiple licenses in the main codebase). They asked Intel to relicense it under the golang license and CLA, but Intel declined.

[0] - "From my point of view, the issue with multiple different licenses is not the restrictions of the license (which I agree are minimal). It's the requirements on the end user. As far as I can tell, using the Intel code directly will require all people who distribute binaries written in Go to include a copy of the Intel copyright notice in their documentation, along with the Go copyright notice that they are already required to include. That is not an imposition to add lightly." https://groups.google.com/forum/?_escaped_fragment_=msg/gola...

A fairer title would have been: Go Patch Containing Code From Intel Currently Blocked By Legal Issues

The title vilifies Intel and from what I can tell they aren't being complete jerks - they merely want their work to remain cited so that they can earn their due credit from contributing to the OSS community.

Very unfair title. Intel have already released the code under a very permissive license, what more do you want from them? All they're refusing to do is sign a copyright waiver, which is absolutely fair.

Well that what you get when you invent your own license. People are afraid of re-licensing. Which is fair in my opinion.

I'm flagging this because the title is misleading. Intel aren't unfairly blocking anything, they just didn't allow relicensing.

Lawyers never want to give something away if you ask them "hey can we give this thing away that no-one ever thought about twice till now?".

Just asking the question makes it too valuable to give away.

flagged hoping that the moderators will change the title or simply delete it. Unless your goal is to attack Intel, I don't see the point to posting this – licenses are a real concern and everyone involved seems to be acting like professionals trying to reconcile it.