We finally got the OK from all contributors with non-trivial commits to
relicense systemd from GPL2+ to LGPL2.1+.
Some udev bits continue to be GPL2+ for now, but we are looking into
relicensing them too, to allow free copy/paste of all code within
systemd.
The bits that used to be MIT continue to be MIT.
The big benefit of the relicensing is that closed source code may now
link against libsystemd-login.so and friends.
This is supposed to play the same roles /var/lib/dbus/machine-id,
however fixes a couple of problems:
- It is available during early boot since it is stored in /etc
- Removes the ID from the D-Bus context and moves it into a system
context, thus hopefully lowering hesitation by people to use it.
- It is generated at installation time. If the file is empty at boot
time it will be mounted over with a randomly generated ID, which is
not saved to disk. This is useful to support state-less machines with
no transient or writable /etc configuration.
Lennart Poettering