Re: [OSS-Tools] [PATCH dt-utils 1/4] treewide: add SPDX identifiers to files with GPL-2.0-or-later license

[Roland Hieber <rhi@pengutronix.de>]

On Tue, Mar 30, 2021 at 07:31:24PM +0200, Ahmad Fatoum wrote:
> Hello Roland,
> 
> On 30.03.21 17:53, Roland Hieber wrote:
> > On Tue, Mar 30, 2021 at 03:50:19PM +0200, Ahmad Fatoum wrote:
> >> Hello,
> >>
> >> On 30.03.21 15:30, Uwe Kleine-König wrote:
> >>> Hello,
> >>>
> >>> On Tue, Mar 30, 2021 at 01:22:26PM +0200, Ahmad Fatoum wrote:
> >>>> On 30.03.21 13:08, Roland Hieber wrote:
> >>>>> Uwe, could I get a Reviewed-by from you for these four patches? :-)
> >>>>
> >>>> We must still carry the full license texts in the project (cf. Linux
> >>>> LICENSES/). This is missing here, no?
> >>>
> >>> well, it depends on what you want to achieve. If you want to become SPDX
> >>> conformant this is indeed necessary. IMHO the conversion from several
> >>> different boilerplate license specifications to a single line is
> >>> beneficial even if the full licenses are not (yet) in the project.
> >>
> >> If the code says that the license terms need to be distributed along
> >> with the software, you are violating the license terms, if you don't
> >> abide by this. This is unrelated to SPDX-Conformance.
> > 
> > Nothing in the license headers or in the GPL or in the Zlib license says
> > that we have to distribute the license text along with the source code.
> > On the contrary, there are even some versions of GPL license headers
> > that have a clause "if you didn't a license text along with the
> > software, write to the FSF at $ADDRESS".

Apparently I was wrong about this, see GPL Clause 1.

> If Zlib says "This notice may not be removed or altered from any
> source distribution.", I interpret this as meaning that we need to ship
> the full text as part of the source distribution and only a
> SPDX-License-Identifier that can be looked up on a website somewhere doesn't
> suffice.

Yes. Hmm. GPL says a similar thing in Clause 1 ("keep intact all the
notices that refer to this License and to the absence of any warranty").
When thinking about it, I'd rather keep the original comment headers
intact and only add an SPDX license tag, and I don't understand why
these notices were removed in Linux when Linux moved to SPDX
identifiers. I also didn't find any reasoning on this.

 - Roland

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Roland Hieber, Pengutronix e.K.          | r.hieber@pengutronix.de     |
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