Re: [PATCH] samples: replace FSF address with web source in license notices

Pavel Machek
2017-11-22T22:23:41Z

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On Wed 2017-11-15 09:45:41, Greg KH wrote:
> On Wed, Nov 15, 2017 at 08:46:51AM +0100, Martin Kepplinger wrote:
> > Am 15.11.2017 07:29 schrieb Greg KH:
> > > On Tue, Nov 14, 2017 at 10:50:37AM +0100, Martin Kepplinger wrote:
> > > > A few years ago the FSF moved and "59 Temple Place" is wrong. Having
> > > > this
> > > > still in our source files feels old and unmaintained.
> > > >
> > > > Let's take the license statement serious and not confuse users.
> > > >
> > > > As https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-howto.html suggests, we replace
> > > > the
> > > > postal address with "<http://www.gnu.org/licenses/>" in the samples
> > > > directory.
> > >
> > > What would be best is to just put the SPDX single line at the top of the
> > > files, and then remove this license "boilerplate" entirely. I've
> > > started to do that with some subsystems already (drivers/usb/ and
> > > drivers/tty/ are almost finished, see Linus's tree for details), and
> > > I've sent out a patch series for drivers/s390/ yesterday if you want to
> > > see an example of how to do it.
> > >
> > > Could you do that here instead of this patch as well?
> > >
> >
> > Is there consensus about this? I'm not a layer, but is this clear enough for
> > useres? And what holds against only adding the new SPDX tag line at the top?
>
> What do you mean by "adding a new" line? That would change the license
> of the file, so don't do that :)
>
> And yes, a single SPDX line in the file is determined to be a valid
> legal mark of the license of the file according to all of the lawyers I
> have been working with from lots of different companies. See the last
> s390 patch series for one such example of that.
>
> > Other than I don't like mixing // and /**/ comments, it indeed looks
> > quite clean. Is there consensus about the syntax too?
>
> See the patch series from Thomas on lkml for the syntax format, the
> "consensus" was driven by Linus :)

Linus is simply wrong here. SPDX at first line of file looks extremely
ugly, and basically negates most of the SPDX advantages. I'm sure
Linus will accept replacing the license text with SPDX (so no // crap
at the first line of file), which should look way better, and is what
U-Boot does.

Pavel
--
(english) http://www.livejournal.com/~pavelmachek
(cesky, pictures) http://atrey.karlin.mff.cuni.cz/~pavel/picture/horses/blog.html

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