Re: [PATCH] Add SPDX idenitifier and clarify license

From: Dirk Hohndel <dirk@hohndel.org>
To: Sean Paul <seanpaul@chromium.org>
Cc: "Thomas Hellstrom" <thellstrom@vmware.com>,
	"Christian König" <christian.koenig@amd.com>,
	dri-devel@lists.freedesktop.org
Subject: Re: [PATCH] Add SPDX idenitifier and clarify license
Date: Wed, 2 May 2018 23:25:35 +0200	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <20180502212522.GD1309@rrmbpvm.gr8dns.org> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <20180502203330.GX73214@art_vandelay>

On Wed, May 02, 2018 at 04:33:30PM -0400, Sean Paul wrote:
> > > diff --git a/drivers/gpu/drm/ttm/ttm_agp_backend.c b/drivers/gpu/drm/ttm/ttm_agp_backend.c
> > > index 7c2485fe88d8..ea4d59eb8966 100644
> > > --- a/drivers/gpu/drm/ttm/ttm_agp_backend.c
> > > +++ b/drivers/gpu/drm/ttm/ttm_agp_backend.c
> > > @@ -1,3 +1,4 @@
> > > +/* SPDX-License-Identifier: GPL-2.0 OR MIT */
> > >  /**************************************************************************
> > >   *
> > >   * Copyright (c) 2006-2009 VMware, Inc., Palo Alto, CA., USA
> > 
> > Probably a stupid question, but can't you remove the boilerplate license now?
> > 
> 
> Answering my own question, there are differences between the license in the files
> and the SPDX license [1]. They are: 
> - the license in the files adds "(including the next paragraph)" in the second
>   paragraph
> - the files have "AND/OR ITS SUPPLIERS" in the third paragraph
> - a couple of list items are transposed and changed, but should be fine
>   according to [2]
> 
> So IANAL, but it seems like you should either add the SPDX and remove the
> boilerplate, or keep the boilerplate and skip the SPDX. 

I am not a lawyer, either, so I asked a couple before starting this little
project...

GPL and similar license boilerplate can be replaced (and I removed it from
some files in other commits that I'm working on to clean up the files
which originated from VMware), but the MIT license is a template license
and because of that the Copyright notice is actually part of the license
and in order for people to be able to reproduce that, you aren't supposed
to remove the boilerplate.

There  are a number of variations of the MIT license, a bit of googling
seems to indicate that the text that already existed in those files is the
MIT/X-Consortium flavor of the license - that's where the "including the
next paragraph" can be found, see here
https://www.x.org/releases/X11R7.7/doc/xorg-docs/License.html

SPDX appears to consider those licenses equivalent (they have a different,
older flavor of the X11 license as "X11".

Similarly, the "and/or its suppliers" language seems to have been added by some
project around X (but I wasn't able to pin down where exactly it came from), but
once again the lawyers don't appear to see an issue.

So in summary
- we need to keep the boilerplate for MIT (but not GPL)
- the text modifications should be OK (and the scanners appear to
  recognize the existing text as MIT)

Not sure this answers your question.

/D
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