[oe] The license of hostapd v2.6

[Yong Zhang (AUTO-BI)]

Hi Andre,

I am a newer here. Could you provide guide to submit the patch, or could you help to do it?

Regards,
Yong

-----Original Message-----
From: Andre McCurdy [mailto:armccurdy at gmail.com] 
Sent: Wednesday, March 14, 2018 6:19 AM
To: Yong Zhang (AUTO-BI) <zyong at qti.qualcomm.com>
Cc: openembedded-devel at lists.openembedded.org
Subject: Re: [oe] The license of hostapd v2.6

On Mon, Mar 12, 2018 at 10:35 PM, Yong Zhang (AUTO-BI) <zyong at qti.qualcomm.com> wrote:
>
> May I ask why the hostapd license is set to "GPLv2 | BSD"? According to the information we get, the hostapd license is "BSD". Could you provide the basis of "GPLv2" license?

Because it's a mistake. The LICENSE definition in the recipe was not updated when the hostapd licensing was changed in 2012.

Unfortunately these kind of mistakes are not uncommon. Contributors of version update patches often don't take the time to check carefully for changes in the source (licensing changes, new configure options,
etc) and there are very few people who review patches sent to the list (even worse, a negative review on the list is no guarantee that a patch won't just get merged anyway - so over time people who may be inclined to review patches tend to stop bothering).

So, in summary - you have found a bug! Perhaps you can submit a patch to fix the LICENSE definition in the recipe?

----

For reference, the top level of the hostapd source tree contains a COPYING file which states:

This software was previously distributed under BSD/GPL v2 dual license terms that allowed either of those license alternatives to be selected. As of February 11, 2012, the project has chosen to use only the BSD license option for future distribution. As such, the GPL v2 license option is no longer used. It should be noted that the BSD license option (the one with advertisement clause removed) is compatible with GPL and as such, does not prevent use of this software in projects that use GPL.

Some of the files may still include pointers to GPL version 2 license terms. However, such copyright and license notifications are maintained only for attribution purposes and any distribution of this software after February 11, 2012 is no longer under the GPL v2 option.