Re: [PATCH] Add SPDX idenitifier and clarify license

From: "Christian König" <ckoenig.leichtzumerken@gmail.com>
To: Sean Paul <seanpaul@chromium.org>, 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: Fri, 4 May 2018 16:36:31 +0200	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <c1893382-db35-7406-6ae0-ef54189e3bfc@gmail.com> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <20180503124620.GY73214@art_vandelay>

Am 03.05.2018 um 14:46 schrieb Sean Paul:
> 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!

Indeed that is a really cool explanation, going to keep that around for 
the next time somebody requests to remove the headers.

Thanks,
Christian.

> 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

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