license of vmmemctl folder - CDDL/LGPL incompatibility conflict

[juliaszegedi]

Hello,

Could you please help with information regarding the licensing of open-vm-tools/modules/shared/vmmemctl/ subfolder? There are references of both LGPL2.1 and CDDL1.0 on the same files, and these two licenses are incompatible, so cannot be applied both in the same time. Or were this files within this "vmmemctl" folder relicensed only under LGPL2.1, which is the top reference in the files?

Thanks a lot for your help! Julia

[johnwvmw]

Open-vm-tools has been released for multiple *nix operating systems - Linux, FreeBSD and Solaris for example. As an open-source project, users are free to port and modify open-vm-tools as needed for their needs. For the bulk of the source code, the LGPL 2.1 is sufficient.

For code in kernel drivers, even dynamically loadable modules, the LGPL 2.1 is not acceptable to all *nix vendors. In those cases, VMware as released that code with multiple licenses and users or vendors are free to distribute and modify that code under the terms of the License that best meets their needs.

That is the case with the source code in open-vm-tools/modules/shared/... The multiple licenses are not meant to be compatible, but offer the user a choice of the single license under which they will make use of that source code.

I hope that has answered your question.

[Alex-Vaduva]

Thanks for the input! I was also interested in this topic. What I can suggest in order to be cleared what is the license on subfolder is to either include a Readme file with the information you provided, either update the license header on the files by specifying the possibility to choose between LGPL/BSD/CDDL

[Alex-Vaduva]

Also the same can be said about the open-vm-tools/lib folder? That the multiple licenses are not meant to be compatible, but offer the user a choice of the single license under which they will make use of that source code?

Please see open-vm-tools/lib/asyncsocket/asyncsocket.c for example