Re: [PATCH] tcg/LICENSE: Remove no-longer-true statement that TCG is BSD-licensed

["Daniel P. Berrangé" <berrange@redhat.com>]

On Mon, Oct 21, 2019 at 05:36:49PM +0100, Peter Maydell wrote:
> On Mon, 21 Oct 2019 at 15:58, Peter Maydell <peter.maydell@linaro.org> wrote:
> > Since 2008 the tcg/LICENSE file has not changed: it claims that
> > everything under tcg/ is BSD-licensed.
> >
> > This is not true and hasn't been true for years: in 2013 we
> > accepted the tcg/aarch64 target code under a GPLv2-or-later
> > license statement. We don't really consider the tcg
> > subdirectory to be a distinct part of QEMU anyway.
> 
> This commit message misses the other not-BSD bits of code in tcg/:
> tcg/tci.c is GPL-2-or-later
> tcg/tcg-gvec-desc.h, tcg/tcg-op-gvec.[ch], tcg-op-vec.c are LGPL2.1-or-later
> 
> Horse has clearly bolted further from the stable than
> I had first thought.

No matter what text we put in the top LICENSE file is always going to be
rather vague because of the many different licenses scattered across the
codebase.

We really ought to make an effort to add SPDX tags to every file in the
source tree & have checkpatch.pl enforce that all new files come with
SPDX tags too. Identifying licenses for code then becomes a trivial grep.

NB, I'm only suggesting add SPDX /in addition/ to the current license
boilerplate, as removing existing boilerplate license text from a file
can only be done by agreement with the copyright holder(s).

Regards,
Daniel
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