Re: [libvirt PATCH 00/20] Use SPDX-License-Identifier
On a Tuesday in 2020, Eric Blake wrote:
On 8/4/20 12:33 PM, Daniel P. Berrangé wrote:
>On Tue, Aug 04, 2020 at 07:22:40PM +0200, Ján Tomko wrote:
>>Replace the license blurb in every single file with:
>> SPDX-License-Identifier: <human-readable-string>
>>Coincidentally, this is also machine readable.
>
>I've requested legal clarification previously on whether doing this
>kind of replacement is possible.
Thank you for asking that.
I was assmuing based on https://gitlab.com/libvirt/libvirt-ci/-/merge_requests/39
where you only objected to the copyright change that such change in
the license blurb is okay.
>The response I got was that it is
>NOT acceptable unless you have the permission of all copyright
>holders on the source files. The terms of the GPL require that
>license notices are not modified. Replacing this header with the
>SPDX tag counts as modification, even though its essentially
>just a different way of presenting the same information.
>
>NB, the fact that the kernel did such a conversion is not on its
>own, a sufficient ok for doing it in libvirt, as we don't see
>the prep work/analysis/discussions that led into the kernel's
>change.
I'm sorry, I haven't been following the kernel lists. Given that
the consent of *all* the contributors is needed, should I just
drop the idea or would you be open to acking the changes where
you are one of the contributors (IOW: libvirt)
>
>So NACK to this change.
While wholesale replacement of the text is legally problematic,
_adding_ the SPDX tag (in addition to what is already present), should
not be an issue, if you want to respin a lighter-weight patch along
those lines.
That might be beneficial in the GPL-v3+ cases. Possibly GPL-v2+ cases
(as opposed to LGPL-v2+ cases) to single them out.
I don't see the point in libvirt adding more of cruft while not removing
any.
Jano
--
Eric Blake, Principal Software Engineer
Red Hat, Inc. +1-919-301-3226
Virtualization: qemu.org | libvirt.org
Attachments:
- signature.asc (application/pgp-signature — 488 bytes)