Re: Implement SPDX-Copyright

[Greg KH <gregkh@linuxfoundation.org>]

On Fri, May 24, 2019 at 04:22:54PM +0200, Max Mehl wrote:
> Dear all,
> 
> Great to see such a big effort going on so smoothly thanks to the
> excellent collaboration here! I would like to make a small suggestion
> for further improvement while we are already touching so many files in
> Linux.
> 
> Currently, the REUSE and SPDX team are discussing the official
> introduction of the *SPDX-Copyright* tag [^1] [^2], perhaps for SPDX 2.2
> and REUSE 3.0. 
> 
> The benefit is that tools can easily detect the correct line which holds
> the copyright/author/year information. As of now, there are files which
> contain multiple occurrences of the word "Copyright", "©" or "(c)",
> which then requires the usage of error-prone logics and patterns.
> 
> Let me give a concrete example. The following header from one of the
> first patches sent around here:
> 
> 
>   // SPDX-License-Identifier: GPL-2.0-or-later
>   /*
>    * Copyright (C) 2013 Pavel Machek <pavel@ucw.cz>
>    * Copyright (C) 2013-2014 Aaro Koskinen <aaro.koskinen@iki.fi>
> 
> 
> could become:
> 
> 
>   // SPDX-License-Identifier: GPL-2.0-or-later
>   /*
>    * SPDX-Copyright: (C) 2013 Pavel Machek <pavel@ucw.cz>
>    * SPDX-Copyright: (C) 2013-2014 Aaro Koskinen <aaro.koskinen@iki.fi>
> 
> 
> The usage of (C) or any other copyright symbols would probably be up to
> personal style or legal requirements. All this tag intends to achieve is
> to make automatic tooling more robust.

What is wrong with the current tooling that already picks up these
"Copyright" lines?  REUSE does this today (I use it on my userspace
programs), what would changing all of this in the kernel help with that
is currently broken today?

Also note, the absence of the "Copyright" wording does not imply that
the file is not also copyrighted by someone else.  But everyone here
already knows that, right?  :)

thanks,

greg k-h