[RFC PATCH] link principle license to COPYING

[RFC PATCH] link principle license to COPYING

[Alex Bennée]

Some license scanners are particularly dumb and when combined with
automatic license scanning for FLOSS accreditation on forges cause
problems on renewal. As GPL 2.0 applies to the core code link the main
licence text to COPYING to keep everything happy.

This caused issues for the QEMU project recently as we mirror (two!)
copies of u-boot in our project.

Signed-off-by: Alex Bennée <alex.bennee@linaro.org>
---
 COPYING | 1 +
 1 file changed, 1 insertion(+)
 create mode 120000 COPYING

diff --git a/COPYING b/COPYING
new file mode 120000
index 00000000000..1ed3ba6a13c
--- /dev/null
+++ b/COPYING
@@ -0,0 +1 @@
+Licenses/gpl-2.0.txt
\ No newline at end of file
-- 
2.47.3

Re: [RFC PATCH] link principle license to COPYING

[Tom Rini]

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On Mon, Sep 29, 2025 at 04:51:42PM +0100, Alex Bennée wrote:

> Some license scanners are particularly dumb and when combined with
> automatic license scanning for FLOSS accreditation on forges cause
> problems on renewal. As GPL 2.0 applies to the core code link the main
> licence text to COPYING to keep everything happy.
> 
> This caused issues for the QEMU project recently as we mirror (two!)
> copies of u-boot in our project.
> 
> Signed-off-by: Alex Bennée <alex.bennee@linaro.org>

Since Daniel Berrangé posted a similar patch 3 days ago, I assume the
gitlab license renewal is coming up quickly.

In principal, I'm fine with this and will apply a patch shortly.

In practice, we've always had to get a human involved at Gitlab to get
our license renewed as we're clearly within the required terms, it's
just that we've also got some further reading people should do.

-- 
Tom

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Re: [RFC PATCH] link principle license to COPYING

[Alex Bennée]

Tom Rini <trini@konsulko.com> writes:

> On Mon, Sep 29, 2025 at 04:51:42PM +0100, Alex Bennée wrote:
>
>> Some license scanners are particularly dumb and when combined with
>> automatic license scanning for FLOSS accreditation on forges cause
>> problems on renewal. As GPL 2.0 applies to the core code link the main
>> licence text to COPYING to keep everything happy.
>> 
>> This caused issues for the QEMU project recently as we mirror (two!)
>> copies of u-boot in our project.
>> 
>> Signed-off-by: Alex Bennée <alex.bennee@linaro.org>
>
> Since Daniel Berrangé posted a similar patch 3 days ago, I assume the
> gitlab license renewal is coming up quickly.

We fixed it by temporally moving the repo to another project (although
it seems that is not a true mirror as mirroing needs the full paid
GitLab). However it broke a bunch of down-streams tracking earlier
branches.

>
> In principal, I'm fine with this and will apply a patch shortly.
>
> In practice, we've always had to get a human involved at Gitlab to get
> our license renewed as we're clearly within the required terms, it's
> just that we've also got some further reading people should do.

The GitLab process is a click though automated one now. However I did
check GitLab identifies the right license with the patch:

  https://gitlab.com/stsquad/u-boot/


-- 
Alex Bennée
Virtualisation Tech Lead @ Linaro