Re: [PATCH 1/6] include: add SPDX GPL-2.0-only license tags where applicable

From: Roland Hieber <rhi@pengutronix.de>
To: Ahmad Fatoum <a.fatoum@pengutronix.de>
Cc: barebox@lists.infradead.org
Subject: Re: [PATCH 1/6] include: add SPDX GPL-2.0-only license tags where applicable
Date: Fri, 15 Feb 2019 12:18:19 +0100	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <20190215111819.di35ekv2p6yxbion@pengutronix.de> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <18076f65-92b1-a6eb-c4ea-d52ae0b7031e@pengutronix.de>

On Fri, Feb 15, 2019 at 09:57:51AM +0100, Ahmad Fatoum wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> On 11/2/19 11:25, Roland Hieber wrote:
> > On Fri, Feb 08, 2019 at 10:09:19AM +0100, Ahmad Fatoum wrote:
> >>
> >>
> >> On 8/2/19 09:59, Roland Hieber wrote:
> >>> On Fri, Feb 08, 2019 at 06:48:26AM +0100, Oleksij Rempel wrote:
> >>>> Hi Roland,
> >>>>
> >>>> please remove deprecated license headers in same patch.
> >>>
> >>> I decided to leave them to record the original author's intent. There
> >>> are several variations on the GPL headers in the project, the one
> >>> extreme is the full GPL license header including a warranty disclaimer,
> >>> but the other extreme is only a "GPLv2" and nothing more. We can decide
> >>> on the project level to apply the warranty disclaimer. But by removing
> >>> the license headers from individual files, the original author intent is
> >>> lost – maybe the didn't want to include the disclaimer, maybe they
> >>> didn't care, in any case it is not in our possibility to decide over
> >>> their copyright matters and for most of the cases it is too late to
> >>> track some of the people down and ask them.
> >>>
> >>> This all becomes important when someone forks our files to a new
> >>> project. And if that someone does not know what the SPDX license tags
> >>> actually mean, it's better to have the original documentation on the
> >>> file level.
> >>>
> >>> I noticed that Linux usually removes the license headers and only keeps
> >>> the copyright lines, but I wasn't able to find any reason for that. Do
> >>> you have more insight here?
> >>
> >> (Obligatory IANAL)
> > 
> > (Me neither)
> > 
> >> With the copyright, the author states their right to deal as they
> >> see fit with the source code. For example they may relicense. Replacing the
> >> copyright with a SPDX-License-Identifier won't preserve this information.
> > 
> > That sounds like an argument for leaving the copyright headers in the
> > individual files?
> 
> Yes, leave copyright/authorship lines, but replace license text with
> SPDX-License-Identifier.

Ah, we're talking about different things then. I was using "copyright
headers" to include the "(c) author" line as well as the license statement.

I think my current version of the patch gives us best of both worlds,
documentation of author intent as well as machine readability, so I
don't think anything is lost here by adding the SPDX tags.

-- 
Roland Hieber                     | r.hieber@pengutronix.de     |
Pengutronix e.K.                  | https://www.pengutronix.de/ |
Peiner Str. 6-8, 31137 Hildesheim | Phone: +49-5121-206917-5086 |
Amtsgericht Hildesheim, HRA 2686  | Fax:   +49-5121-206917-5555 |

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