Concerns Arise Over Chromium OS (Accidentally?) Re-Licensing Gentoo Ebuilds
Gentoo developer and past council member Patrick Lauer has voiced a problem that Google's Chromium OS team has copied Gentoo ebuilds over to their own Git repository and in the process listed the copyright as belonging to The Chromium OS Authors. Additionally, the license was turned into a BSD-style license rather than the Gentoo ebuilds original license of being GPLv2.
Via the ChromiumOS overlays code is the "Copyright (c) 2011 The Chromium OS Authors. All rights reserved. Use of this source code is governed by a BSD-style license that can be found in the LICENSE file." When it's just containing a copy of Gentoo's ebuilds. The same string was copied over CoreOS portage-stable.
Presumably this is just a misunderstanding/mistake when setting up the repositories as opposed to Google / Chromium OS authors intentionally trying to force the Gentoo ebuilds under a BSD-style license rather than GPL, but Patrick has been unable to get the attribution and license issue resolved himself without being able to know the proper points of contacts for these repositories. He's thus voiced the issue with others in the Gentoo project and Gentoo's trustees while we also ended up finding out about this issue in the process. Chromium OS uses Gentoo's Portage package management system.
Patrick's message to the Gentoo project mailing list can be found via the archives.
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