Re: [patch V5 01/11] Documentation: Add license-rules.rst to describe how to properly identify file licenses

Theodore Ts'o
2017-12-30T04:16:11Z

On Fri, Dec 29, 2017 at 11:17:54PM +0100, Philippe Ombredanne wrote:
> > As far as I know, none of the licenses explicitly say
> > copyright license must be on each file. Just that the distribution of
> > source must include the copyright and license statement. Exactly how
> > that is done is not explicitly specified.
>
> This is also my take. What is done here is not much different than
> refactoring duplicated code so it leaves in a single place:
>
> - by "value" at the root in COPYING and in the Documentation.
> - by "reference" in the code proper as SPDX ids.
>
> Therefore essential and common requirements to include the license
> text is fulfilled in the kernel.
>
> Note that there are a few offenders that will need to clean up their
> acts as they came up will both long and "un-removable and
> un-alterable" crazy legalese blurbs [1] prefix this:
>
> "DO NOT ALTER OR REMOVE COPYRIGHT NOTICES OR THIS FILE HEADER"
>
> These will have to be taken care on a case by case basis. These are
> pretty stupid and IMHO should have never been allowed to be added to
> the kernel in the first place and are ugly warts. It could very well
> be that these are not really GPL-compliant notices FWIW: keeping
> notices and copyrights is quite different from a restriction of
> altering things by moving them around which is exactly what is
> happening with the SPDX-ification here.
>
> [1] https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/tree/drivers/staging/lustre/include/linux/libcfs/libcfs.h?h=v4.15-rc5#n5

Lustre is now owned by Intel so I suspect that some throat clearing
noises in the right direction could easily take care of the issue with
those files....

- Ted