14. November 2023

[dimakuv]

Agenda

(please write your proposed agenda items in comments under this discussion)

• Benny/Dmitrii: licenses of examples (e.g. Python scripts, Makefiles, manifest templates)

Misc

Erica Fu: a new developer on Gramine from UNC, under management of Don Porter.

• Helped to transition research-quality code to more usable code.
• Has experience with embedded systems, low-level systems programming.
• Possible first tasks: documentation, some clean-ups.

Benny/Dmitrii: licenses of examples (e.g. Python scripts, Makefiles, manifest templates)

Benny: built a demo that shows how Gramine SGX protects the application state, using a Python example from our CI-Examples/ and modifying it (manifest template, script).

Q: in general, people seem to take the Gramine example files as a starting point. Can they actually re-license these files (manifest template, Makefile, etc) under their own license, not inheriting LGPL?

Woju: configuration files and Makefiles are not "creative" (it's "craft not art").

• Michal: agrees. It's hard/impossible to write a different config for the same workload. So there is nothing creative about these.
• Woju: we can write some explanation in our documentation/README/LICENSE addendum. But no need to specify licenses for each file.

Don: thinks it's perfectly fine to license them as BSD/MIT.

Benny: We also have an independent question of e.g. Python scripts. Because example Python scripts are not licensed: https://github.com/gramineproject/gramine/blob/master/CI-Examples/python/scripts/sgx-quote.py

Don's proposal: just use a permissive license, with SPDX in every file, and amend LICENSE.addendum.

• Michal agrees.
• Same for the Examples repo.
• Dmitrii: For GSC repo, we already use BSD-3-clause. Let's use the same everywhere.

Actions:

• Examples repo -- change the license, similar to GSC case, to BSD-3-clause.
• Contrib repo -- add licenses for each sub-directory. Intel is responsible for this (ITL didn't participate).
• Gramine repo -- add SPDX with BSD-3-clause in every file, amend LICENSE.addendum. See [CI-Examples] Change the license of all examples to BSD-3-clause #1657.

Woju: upcoming CI changes

Woju will reenable many disabled CI nodes. They all have Debian 12 distro installed now. Woju will now switch to VMs instead of bare-metal nodes, to have more (virtual) nodes and make the CI more parallel.