Re: musl licensing

[Ed Maste <emaste@freebsd.org>]

On 16 March 2016 at 23:19, Rich Felker <dalias@libc.org> wrote:
>
> What would be the minimal requirement for you not to need to modify
> the files? Full license text? Or would something like having the
> copyright holders named and "licensed under standard MIT license" or
> similar (possibly with a reference of some sort) suffice?

I think it depends on context. For example, If we planned to import
musl into our contrib/ tree and build it as a standalone entity the
current form (with no individual file statements) would be just fine.

But in this case, where I hope to combine a few files into our
existing libc I'll want the license text in the file as it's
consistent with the rest of our libc, and it avoids adding a
MIT-LICENSE.txt, MUSL-LICENSE.txt or similar file to the tree.

> I'm trying to gauge if we should try to make it so you don't need to
> modify the files, or if that's not a practical goal while avoiding
> massive comment-spam in source files.

I don't think it's a practical goal to entirely avoid needing to
modify files; I had to do so for a minor header variations or some
such anyhow. From my perspective, my order of preference is full
authorship + license, authorship + license statement, status quo. I do
understand wanting to avoid the full license text though. Do other
potential downstream consumers of musl have a preference?