Re: [PATCH] multipath-tools: replace FSF licences boilerplate with a SPDX-License-Identifier

[Martin Wilck <mwilck@suse.com>]

On Tue, 2025-06-24 at 14:55 +0200, Xose Vazquez Perez wrote:
> Cc: Hannes Reinecke <hare@suse.de>
> Cc: Martin Wilck <mwilck@suse.com>
> Cc: Benjamin Marzinski <bmarzins@redhat.com>
> Cc: Christophe Varoqui <christophe.varoqui@opensvc.com>
> Cc: DM-DEVEL ML <dm-devel@lists.linux.dev>
> Signed-off-by: Xose Vazquez Perez <xose.vazquez@gmail.com>

Reviewed-by: Martin Wilck <mwilck@suse.com>

Thanks!

> ---
> Missing:
> 
> util.c: maybe GPL-2.0-or-later ???
> libmpathutil/util.c: * License: LGPL-2.1-or-later
> libmpathutil/util.c: * Code copied from busybox (GPLv2 or later)
> 
> ambiguous, only "GPL" !!!
> libmultipath/prioritizers/alua.c: * This file is released under the
> GPL.
> libmultipath/prioritizers/alua_rtpg.c: * This file is released under
> the GPL.
> libmultipath/prioritizers/alua_rtpg.h: * This file is released under
> the GPL.
> libmultipath/prioritizers/alua_spc3.h: * This file is released under
> the GPL.
> libmultipath/prioritizers/hds.c: * This file is released under the
> GPL.
> libmultipath/prioritizers/weightedpath.c: *  This file is released
> under the GPL

Please check my previous assessment again [1]:

IMO "GPL" without version should be interpreted as "any version of the
GPL". As these parts of the code are combined with other code that's
licensed under GPL-2.0-only or GPL-2.0-or-later, we should assume that
the respective stricter variant applies to the combination(s).

The "default" license of the multipath-tools project is assumed to be
the license of the first files that were added to Greg KH's udev.git
repo [2], which was LGPL 2.0. We're assuming that files that don't
include an explicit license statement inherit the LGPL-2.0 license from
this first commit in the project.

As you noted, libmpathutil/util.c includes code snippets that
were originally released with different licenses (albeit compatible
ones). We should thus assume that the file itself is under the
strictest of these licenses, which is GPL-2.0-or-later, AFAICS.

However, while I think these interpretations are plausible, I Am Not A
Layer and I wouldn't want to add license headers to files that
currently don't have one. I appreciate that your patch doesn't attempt
to do that.

Regards,
Martin

[1] https://lore.kernel.org/dm-devel/1523313462.3525.65.camel@suse.com/
[2] https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/hotplug/udev.git/commit/?id=04a091d47e32d6480b99424e41db093b013dfaf5