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

Greg KH
2017-11-15T08:45:44Z

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 :)

thanks,

greg k-h