NetworkManager licensing and all new contributions must be under LGPL-2.0+



Hi all,



TL;DR: if you contribute to NetworkManager ([1]), then these
contributions must be made under terms of LGPL-2.0+ license.




The source code of NetworkManager [1] both contains the daemon and the
client library (libnm). Traditionally, the daemon is GPL-2.0+ licensed,
while the library is LGPL-2.0+ licensed.

Mixing these two licenses within the same project is cumbersome,
because we cannot freely copy code from source to the library.

Long term, we might re-license the GPL-2.0+ code as LGPL-2.0+. That is
of coure cumbersome, will take time and needs discussion. If you have
opinions about that, please share them.

Until that, all new/original contributions to NetworkManager shall be
made under terms of LGPL-2.0+, even if the contributions extend
existing GPL-2.0+ code. The reason for that is to make it easier to do
the relicensing in the future so that we don't need to consider
contributions made since today.

Basically, from today on, if you contribute to GPL-2.0+ code of
NetworkManager, you agree that we might change that to LGPL-2.0+ in the
future.


I also updated the CONTRIBUTING file to reflect that [2]. If you
encounter documentation that contradicts what I just said, please point
it out so that it can be fixed.

[1] https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/NetworkManager/NetworkManager

[2] 
https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/NetworkManager/NetworkManager/blob/a3e75f329446a93a61ca4c458a7657bd919f4fe6/CONTRIBUTING#L37


best,
Thomas

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