Re: [PATCH] Add SPDX idenitifier and clarify license

From: Sean Paul <seanpaul@chromium.org>
To: Dirk Hohndel <dirk@hohndel.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: Thu, 3 May 2018 08:46:20 -0400	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <20180503124620.GY73214@art_vandelay> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <20180502212522.GD1309@rrmbpvm.gr8dns.org>

On Wed, May 02, 2018 at 11:25:35PM +0200, Dirk Hohndel wrote:
> 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.

Thank you for the awesome summary, it is very helpful! So since the boilerplate
has to stay, is there a benefit to adding the SPDX header? Is it just to make
scripting/scraping easier?

Sean

> 
> /D

-- 
Sean Paul, Software Engineer, Google / Chromium OS
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