develop and mail out rustc licensing guidelines

[nikomatsakis]

Meeting proposal info

• Title: rustc licensing guidelines
• Type: non-technical
• CC: @skade

Summary

@skade has prepared a draft set of rustc licensing guidelines, available as a dropbox paper document. These are meant to give practical advice for how to be respectful of licenses and also how to reach out for help if needed. I thought we could review the guidelines, offer suggestions and make sure we understand them, and decide where we want to post them.

About this issue

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[pnkfelix]

Sees like this issue is at least semi-related: rust-lang/rust#63232

[skade]

@pnkfelix it is indeed coming out of a number of issues where we had practical and theoretical licensing problems.

[pnkfelix]

For ease of future reference (transcribed from rust-lang/rust#63232 (comment)):

Collecting a few Rust licensing infidelities:

• Crate declares incorrect Apache/MIT license compiler-builtins#307
• Package is incorrectly licensed Apache/MIT libm#215
• backtrace-sys crate declares incorrect Apache/MIT license backtrace-rs#234
• Inconsistent licensing language sfackler/rust-openssl#1147
• deps.rs EXCEPTIONS needs to be re-triaged rust#63238

see also:

• RISC-V implementation contains likely GPL-3 code compiler-builtins#319

[nikomatsakis]

In today's design meeting, we decided to remove the "meeting proposal" from this issue and instead consider it as a "wg-meta work item"

[nikomatsakis]

We felt like a good idea would be to distribute guidelines via e-mail and perhaps do a meeting to talk them over.

[wesleywiser]

We updated the rustc-dev-guide with licensing considerations taken from the paper doc to help reviewers know what kinds of changes are acceptable from a licensing perspective. I don't think we need a dedicated steering meeting to review this (and this meeting proposal has been open for years now) so we're going close this as completed.