From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: from Galois.linutronix.de ([146.0.238.70]:45887 "EHLO Galois.linutronix.de" rhost-flags-OK-OK-OK-OK) by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S964791AbdKPNM3 (ORCPT ); Thu, 16 Nov 2017 08:12:29 -0500 Date: Thu, 16 Nov 2017 14:12:19 +0100 (CET) From: Thomas Gleixner Subject: Re: [patch 2/7] LICENSES: Add the GPL 2.0 license In-Reply-To: <20171116114639.GA16946@silk.coyote.org> Message-ID: References: <20171112191821.240484206@linutronix.de> <20171112192142.614461013@linutronix.de> <20171116114639.GA16946@silk.coyote.org> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Sender: linux-xfs-owner@vger.kernel.org List-ID: List-Id: xfs To: Jonas Oberg Cc: LKML , Linus Torvalds , Andrew Morton , Jonathan Corbet , Kate Stewart , Philippe Ombredanne , Greg Kroah-Hartman , Christoph Hellwig , Russell King , Rob Herring , Joe Perches , linux-xfs@vger.kernel.org, Kate Stewart Jonas, On Thu, 16 Nov 2017, Jonas Oberg wrote: > Hi Thomas, > > I do appreciate your work on this, it's a welcome addition! > > > +SPDX-License-Identifier: GPL-2.0 // GPLv2 only > > +SPDX-License-Identifier: GPL-2.0+ // GPLv2 or later > > I am concerned about this though, as the SPDX-License-Identifier is well > known to refer to the license of the document in which it appears, and > it would be beneficial to avoid a situation where a tool reading this > make the assumption the license text itself it under a particular > license. Essentially, let's avoid overloading if we can. Makes sense > >From my reading, there are two intentions with the above reading: > > 1) To give usage guidelines and signal that for any source file, adding > this exact line would be a valid license identifier, and > 2) To make the license identifiers computer understandable such that > tools can be updated to validate whether source code includes a > license identifier which corresponds to one of the licenses in > LICENSES/ > > I'd propose to not try to do both at the same time and would propose > a 'Valid-License-Identifier' tag to meet your second criteria, and > a 'Usage-Guidance' tag to meet your first one. The header would then > be: > > Valid-License-Identifier: GPL-2.0 > Valid-License-Identifier: GPL-2.0+ > Usage-Guidance: > To use this license in source code, you can use either of the following tags > and values: > . > SPDX-License-Identifier: GPL-2.0 // For GPLv2 only > SPDX-License-Identifier: GPL-2.0+ // For GPLv2 or any later version I can live with that. Thanks for looking over this! tglx