License cleanup: add SPDX GPL-2.0 license identifier to files with no license

From: Greg Kroah-Hartman <[email protected]>

Source kernel commit: b24413180f5600bcb3bb70fbed5cf186b60864bd

Many source files in the tree are missing licensing information, which makes it harder for compliance tools to determine the correct license.

By default all files without license information are under the default license of the kernel, which is GPL version 2.

Update the files which contain no license information with the 'GPL-2.0' SPDX license identifier. The SPDX identifier is a legally binding shorthand, which can be used instead of the full boiler plate text.

This patch is based on work done by Thomas Gleixner and Kate Stewart and Philippe Ombredanne.

How this work was done:

Patches were generated and checked against linux-4.14-rc6 for a subset of the use cases:
- file had no licensing information it it.
- file was a */uapi/* one with no licensing information in it,
- file was a */uapi/* one with existing licensing information,

Further patches will be generated in subsequent months to fix up cases where non-standard license headers were used, and references to license had to be inferred by heuristics based on keywords.

The analysis to determine which SPDX License Identifier to be applied to a file was done in a spreadsheet of side by side results from of the output of two independent scanners (ScanCode & Windriver) producing SPDX tag:value files created by Philippe Ombredanne. Philippe prepared the base worksheet, and did an initial spot review of a few 1000 files.

The 4.13 kernel was the starting point of the analysis with 60,537 files assessed. Kate Stewart did a file by file comparison of the scanner results in the spreadsheet to determine which SPDX license identifier(s) to be applied to the file. She confirmed any determination that was not immediately clear with lawyers working with the Linux Foundation.

Criteria used to select files for SPDX license identifier tagging was:
- Files considered eligible had to be source code files.
- Make and config files were included as candidates if they contained >5 lines of source
- File already had some variant of a license header in it (even if <5 lines).

All documentation files were explicitly excluded.

The following heuristics were used to determine which SPDX license identifiers to apply.

- when both scanners couldn't find any license traces, file was considered to have no license information in it, and the top level COPYING file license applied.

For non */uapi/* files that summary was:

SPDX license identifier # files
---------------------------------------------------|-------
GPL-2.0 11139

and resulted in the first patch in this series.

If that file was a */uapi/* path one, it was "GPL-2.0 WITH Linux-syscall-note" otherwise it was "GPL-2.0". Results of that was:

SPDX license identifier # files
---------------------------------------------------|-------
GPL-2.0 WITH Linux-syscall-note 930

and resulted in the second patch in this series.

- if a file had some form of licensing information in it, and was one of the */uapi/* ones, it was denoted with the Linux-syscall-note if any GPL family license was found in the file or had no licensing in it (per prior point). Results summary:

SPDX license identifier # files
---------------------------------------------------|------
GPL-2.0 WITH Linux-syscall-note 270
GPL-2.0+ WITH Linux-syscall-note 169

((GPL-2.0 WITH Linux-syscall-note) OR BSD-2-Clause)    21
((GPL-2.0 WITH Linux-syscall-note) OR BSD-3-Clause)    17
LGPL-2.1+ WITH Linux-syscall-note                      15
GPL-1.0+ WITH Linux-syscall-note                       14
((GPL-2.0+ WITH Linux-syscall-note) OR BSD-3-Clause)    5
LGPL-2.0+ WITH Linux-syscall-note                       4
LGPL-2.1 WITH Linux-syscall-note                        3
((GPL-2.0 WITH Linux-syscall-note) OR MIT)              3
((GPL-2.0 WITH Linux-syscall-note) AND MIT)             1

and that resulted in the third patch in this series.

- when the two scanners agreed on the detected license(s), that became the concluded license(s).

- when there was disagreement between the two scanners (one detected a license but the other didn't, or they both detected different licenses) a manual inspection of the file occurred.

- In most cases a manual inspection of the information in the file resulted in a clear resolution of the license that should apply (and which scanner probably needed to revisit its heuristics).

- When it was not immediately clear, the license identifier was confirmed with lawyers working with the Linux Foundation.

- If there was any question as to the appropriate license identifier, the file was flagged for further research and to be revisited later in time.

In total, over 70 hours of logged manual review was done on the spreadsheet to determine the SPDX license identifiers to apply to the source files by Kate, Philippe, Thomas and, in some cases, confirmation by lawyers working with the Linux Foundation.

Kate also obtained a third independent scan of the 4.13 code base from FOSSology, and compared selected files where the other two scanners disagreed against that SPDX file, to see if there was new insights. The Windriver scanner is based on an older version of FOSSology in part, so they are related.

Thomas did random spot checks in about 500 files from the spreadsheets for the uapi headers and agreed with SPDX license identifier in the files he inspected. For the non-uapi files Thomas did random spot checks in about 15000 files.

In initial set of patches against 4.14-rc6, 3 files were found to have copy/paste license identifier errors, and have been fixed to reflect the correct identifier.

Additionally Philippe spent 10 hours this week doing a detailed manual inspection and review of the 12,461 patched files from the initial patch version early this week with:
- a full scancode scan run, collecting the matched texts, detected license ids and scores
- reviewing anything where there was a license detected (about 500+ files) to ensure that the applied SPDX license was correct
- reviewing anything where there was no detection but the patch license was not GPL-2.0 WITH Linux-syscall-note to ensure that the applied SPDX license was correct

This produced a worksheet with 20 files needing minor correction. This worksheet was then exported into 3 different .csv files for the different types of files to be modified.

These .csv files were then reviewed by Greg. Thomas wrote a script to parse the csv files and add the proper SPDX tag to the file, in the format that the file expected. This script was further refined by Greg based on the output to detect more types of files automatically and to distinguish between header and source .c files (which need different comment types.) Finally Greg ran the script using the .csv files to generate the patches.

Reviewed-by Kate Stewart <[email protected]>

Reviewed-by Philippe Ombredanne <[email protected]>

Reviewed-by Thomas Gleixner <[email protected]>

Signed-off-by Greg Kroah-Hartman <[email protected]>

---
 libxfs/xfs_cksum.h |    1 +
 1 file changed, 1 insertion(+)

libxfs/xfs_cksum.h +1 -1

index 8211f48..999a290 100644
@@ -1,3 +1,4 @@
+/* SPDX-License-Identifier: GPL-2.0 */
 #ifndef _XFS_CKSUM_H
 #define _XFS_CKSUM_H 1
 
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NAK, for both the libxfs patch and the kernel one.

I wrote the file and it has no copyright header because it conatians trivial, non-copyrightable code.

I don't know why people think they can touch license information on files I've written without even asking me.

Quoted 1 line · Christoph Hellwig

NAK, for both the libxfs patch and the kernel one.

What libxfs patch? And what "kernel one" are you referring to here?

Quoted 2 lines

I wrote the file and it has no copyright header because it conatians trivial, non-copyrightable code.

What file exactly?

And from what I know, there is nothing that is "non-copyrightable".

Quoted 5 lines · On Tue, 7 Nov 2017 08:39:40 +0100 Greg Kroah-Hartman…

Quoted 1 line · Christoph Hellwig

NAK, for both the libxfs patch and the kernel one.

What libxfs patch? And what "kernel one" are you referring to here?

Quoted 6 lines

Quoted 2 lines

I wrote the file and it has no copyright header because it conatians trivial, non-copyrightable code.

What file exactly?

And from what I know, there is nothing that is "non-copyrightable".

You'd be wrong on that. Lots of things are not copyrightable.

Quoted 3 lines

Quoted 1 line

And from what I know, there is nothing that is "non-copyrightable".

You'd be wrong on that. Lots of things are not copyrightable.

Ok, fair enough, but code is not one of those :)

Quoted 5 lines

Quoted 3 lines

Quoted 1 line

And from what I know, there is nothing that is "non-copyrightable".

You'd be wrong on that. Lots of things are not copyrightable.

Ok, fair enough, but code is not one of those :)

You'd still be wrong.

Quoted 1 line · Christoph Hellwig

NAK, for both the libxfs patch and the kernel one.

What libxfs patch? And what "kernel one" are you referring to here?

Quoted 2 lines

I wrote the file and it has no copyright header because it conatians trivial, non-copyrightable code.

What file exactly?

And from what I know, there is nothing that is "non-copyrightable".

And this isn't changing the copyright of _ANYTHING_ it is just putting the explicit license of the file, on each file in the kernel, because it needs to be tracked.

Quoted 2 lines

I don't know why people think they can touch license information on files I've written without even asking me.

Nothing was changed, the license should be the exact same as it was before. But as I don't know what file you are referring to here, it's a bit hard to determine what you are talking about exactly :(

thanks,

greg k-h
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Quoted 16 lines · Greg Kroah-Hartman

Quoted 1 line · Christoph Hellwig

NAK, for both the libxfs patch and the kernel one.

What libxfs patch? And what "kernel one" are you referring to here?

Quoted 2 lines

I wrote the file and it has no copyright header because it conatians trivial, non-copyrightable code.

What file exactly?

And from what I know, there is nothing that is "non-copyrightable".

And this isn't changing the copyright of _ANYTHING_ it is just putting the explicit license of the file, on each file in the kernel, because it needs to be tracked.

Quoted 6 lines

Quoted 2 lines

I don't know why people think they can touch license information on files I've written without even asking me.

Nothing was changed, the license should be the exact same as it was before. But as I don't know what file you are referring to here, it's a bit hard to determine what you are talking about exactly :(

fs/xfs/libxfs/xfs_cksum.h

Given that it had no license text on it at all, it "defaults" to GPLv2, so the GPLv2 SPDX identifier was added to it.

No copyright was changed, nothing at all happened except we explicitly list the license of the file, instead of it being "implicit" before.

Quoted 5 lines

Given that it had no license text on it at all, it "defaults" to GPLv2, so the GPLv2 SPDX identifier was added to it.

No copyright was changed, nothing at all happened except we explicitly list the license of the file, instead of it being "implicit" before.

Well if Christoph owns the copyright (if there is one) and he has stated he believes it is too trivial to copyright then it needs an SPDX tag that indicates the rightsholder has stated it's too trivial to copyright and (by estoppel) revoked any right they might have to pursue a claim.

I'm sure there's a correct SPDX tag for that ;-)

Alan

Quoted 10 lines · Alan Cox

Quoted 5 lines

Given that it had no license text on it at all, it "defaults" to GPLv2, so the GPLv2 SPDX identifier was added to it.

No copyright was changed, nothing at all happened except we explicitly list the license of the file, instead of it being "implicit" before.

Well if Christoph owns the copyright (if there is one) and he has stated he believes it is too trivial to copyright then it needs an SPDX tag that indicates the rightsholder has stated it's too trivial to copyright and (by estoppel) revoked any right they might have to pursue a claim.

If Cristoph has revoked any right to pursue a claim, then he's also legally given up the right to complain if, say, Bradley Kuhn starting distributing a version with a GPLv3 permission statement --- or if Greg K-H adds a GPLv2 SPDX identifier. :-)

Quoted 12 lines · Theodore Ts'o

Quoted 10 lines · Alan Cox

Quoted 5 lines

Given that it had no license text on it at all, it "defaults" to GPLv2, so the GPLv2 SPDX identifier was added to it.

No copyright was changed, nothing at all happened except we explicitly list the license of the file, instead of it being "implicit" before.

Well if Christoph owns the copyright (if there is one) and he has stated he believes it is too trivial to copyright then it needs an SPDX tag that indicates the rightsholder has stated it's too trivial to copyright and (by estoppel) revoked any right they might have to pursue a claim.

Quoted 4 lines

If Cristoph has revoked any right to pursue a claim, then he's also legally given up the right to complain if, say, Bradley Kuhn starting distributing a version with a GPLv3 permission statement --- or if Greg K-H adds a GPLv2 SPDX identifier. :-)

First Christoph really appreciateѕ spelling his name right.

Second Christoph really appreciates talking to him when trying to slap on licensing bits on his code. I'm not evil, but I'd really like to understand what you are doing and why, and I might be fairly agreeable if that makes sense.

Doing batch annotations of code where you do not the know any of the history of is a receipt for a desaster if we want to use that information anywhere.

Quoted 19 lines · Christoph Hellwig

Quoted 16 lines · Theodore Ts'o

Quoted 10 lines · Alan Cox

Quoted 5 lines

Given that it had no license text on it at all, it "defaults" to GPLv2, so the GPLv2 SPDX identifier was added to it.

No copyright was changed, nothing at all happened except we explicitly list the license of the file, instead of it being "implicit" before.

Well if Christoph owns the copyright (if there is one) and he has stated he believes it is too trivial to copyright then it needs an SPDX tag that indicates the rightsholder has stated it's too trivial to copyright and (by estoppel) revoked any right they might have to pursue a claim.

If Cristoph has revoked any right to pursue a claim, then he's also legally given up the right to complain if, say, Bradley Kuhn starting distributing a version with a GPLv3 permission statement --- or if Greg K-H adds a GPLv2 SPDX identifier. :-)

Quoted 6 lines

First Christoph really appreciateѕ spelling his name right.

Second Christoph really appreciates talking to him when trying to slap on licensing bits on his code. I'm not evil, but I'd really like to understand what you are doing and why, and I might be fairly agreeable if that makes sense.

I already described it in the pull request, and in this patch itself,

Quoted 20 lines · Greg Kroah-Hartman

Quoted 19 lines · Christoph Hellwig

Quoted 16 lines · Theodore Ts'o

Quoted 10 lines · Alan Cox

Quoted 5 lines

Given that it had no license text on it at all, it "defaults" to GPLv2, so the GPLv2 SPDX identifier was added to it.

No copyright was changed, nothing at all happened except we explicitly list the license of the file, instead of it being "implicit" before.

Well if Christoph owns the copyright (if there is one) and he has stated he believes it is too trivial to copyright then it needs an SPDX tag that indicates the rightsholder has stated it's too trivial to copyright and (by estoppel) revoked any right they might have to pursue a claim.

If Cristoph has revoked any right to pursue a claim, then he's also legally given up the right to complain if, say, Bradley Kuhn starting distributing a version with a GPLv3 permission statement --- or if Greg K-H adds a GPLv2 SPDX identifier. :-)

Quoted 8 lines

Quoted 6 lines

First Christoph really appreciateѕ spelling his name right.

Second Christoph really appreciates talking to him when trying to slap on licensing bits on his code. I'm not evil, but I'd really like to understand what you are doing and why, and I might be fairly agreeable if that makes sense.

I already described it in the pull request, and in this patch itself,

The upstream commit b24413180f5600 ("License cleanup: add SPDX GPL-2.0 license identifier to files with no license") mentions:

Many source files in the tree are missing licensing information, which makes it harder for compliance tools to determine the correct license.

We typically have not cared bout this, what has changed for us to want to actually go ahead and do all this work?

It further states:

By default all files without license information are under the default license of the kernel, which is GPL version 2.

Update the files which contain no license information with the 'GPL-2.0' SPDX license identifier. The SPDX identifier is a legally binding shorthand, which can be used instead of the full boiler plate text.

It says a bit about legally binding stuff, that's strong language, however its unclear to me about what it could mean for dual licensed stuff where the goal is for the GPL to apply say on Linux but another license outside of Linux.

So what type of legally binding definition was being concocted here, how did such consensus get reached and why did we turn around and decide to embrace it all of a sudden whereas we had not done so before?

By default all files without license information are under the default license of the kernel, which is GPL version 2.

Quoted 19 lines · Christoph Hellwig

Quoted 12 lines · Theodore Ts'o

Quoted 10 lines · Alan Cox

Quoted 5 lines

Given that it had no license text on it at all, it "defaults" to GPLv2, so the GPLv2 SPDX identifier was added to it.

No copyright was changed, nothing at all happened except we explicitly list the license of the file, instead of it being "implicit" before.

Well if Christoph owns the copyright (if there is one) and he has stated he believes it is too trivial to copyright then it needs an SPDX tag that indicates the rightsholder has stated it's too trivial to copyright and (by estoppel) revoked any right they might have to pursue a claim.

Quoted 4 lines

If Cristoph has revoked any right to pursue a claim, then he's also legally given up the right to complain if, say, Bradley Kuhn starting distributing a version with a GPLv3 permission statement --- or if Greg K-H adds a GPLv2 SPDX identifier. :-)

Quoted 6 lines

First Christoph really appreciateѕ spelling his name right.

Second Christoph really appreciates talking to him when trying to slap on licensing bits on his code. I'm not evil, but I'd really like to understand what you are doing and why, and I might be fairly agreeable if that makes sense.

I already described it in the pull request, and in this patch itself, and in this thread already, what is happening, why it was done, and how it was done. I don't know how everyone who was on the original email thread got dropped and the xfs mailing list added, that's just odd...

Quoted 3 lines

Doing batch annotations of code where you do not the know any of the history of is a receipt for a desaster if we want to use that information anywhere.

But we did research the history as well as we could when touching 11k files at a single time. It's been months of research and work, as described in the patch.

If we got something wrong, very sorry, not a problem, please, let's put the proper license on the file and all will be good. What file are you concerned about, and what license belongs on it? This patch only touched files without any license header, so again, by default that implied it was GPLv2. Again, no copyright was changed at all.

thanks,

greg k-h
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Had anyone involved us, I would have suggested fixing the whole XFS tree to use the shortened tag instead of each file containing its own mutations of the GPL, and our broader XFS community could have worked with you on this.

Quoted 12 lines · Theodore Ts'o

Quoted 10 lines · Alan Cox

Quoted 5 lines

Given that it had no license text on it at all, it "defaults" to GPLv2, so the GPLv2 SPDX identifier was added to it.

No copyright was changed, nothing at all happened except we explicitly list the license of the file, instead of it being "implicit" before.

Well if Christoph owns the copyright (if there is one) and he has stated he believes it is too trivial to copyright then it needs an SPDX tag that indicates the rightsholder has stated it's too trivial to copyright and (by estoppel) revoked any right they might have to pursue a claim.

Quoted 4 lines

If Cristoph has revoked any right to pursue a claim, then he's also legally given up the right to complain if, say, Bradley Kuhn starting distributing a version with a GPLv3 permission statement --- or if Greg K-H adds a GPLv2 SPDX identifier. :-)

First Christoph really appreciateѕ spelling his name right.

Second Christoph really appreciates talking to him when trying to slap on licensing bits on his code. I'm not evil, but I'd really like to understand what you are doing and why, and I might be fairly agreeable if that makes sense.

Doing batch annotations of code where you do not the know any of the history of is a receipt for a desaster if we want to use that information anywhere.

So Greg, please explain WTF you are trying to do and talk to the people who wrote the code you are "annotating".

From an engineering perspective this feels to me as pure madness,

The benefits now and later:
- no distraction with licensing boilerplate cr*p in patches and files
- no guessing licensing needed when sending a patch
- anyone can grep the kernel tree for licensing, no extra tool needed
- Greg must feel really good about deleting so much things for once

The downsides:
- folks can no longer express their creativity in licensing texts like licensing thermal code under the "therms" of the GPL [2]

Quoted 5 lines · Philippe Ombredanne

The benefits now and later:
- no distraction with licensing boilerplate cr*p in patches and files
- no guessing licensing needed when sending a patch
- anyone can grep the kernel tree for licensing, no extra tool needed
- Greg must feel really good about deleting so much things for once

This patch didn't delete anything, it added random notes.

I see now Greg deletes things from files he maintains which is even worse, given that the kernel tree doesn't document anywhere what these tags actually mean.

So he deletes a lot of license tags and replaces them with tags he puts a great significance on, but which aren't defined. A quick googles shows some Linuxfoundation web page defines them, but they could change them any time they want, nevermind that we don't even have a reference to them either.

Quoted 4 lines

The downsides:
- folks can no longer express their creativity in licensing texts like licensing thermal code under the "therms" of the GPL [2]

I'd love something like that to happen. But for that we don't need a sneaky patch that doesn't talk to kernel contributors.

For that we need to

a) agree on which licensing schemes we accept for future contributions
b) cleary document that policy in the kernel tree
c) reject anything that doesn't matter the above policy by manual and/or automated review

An automated tag scheme might help with b) and c) above if done properly. But for that we need to document it, agree on it, discuss it with everyone involved, etc. None of that has happened. Instead Greg farted arcane tags that he thinks have a legal singnificance all over three three without talking to the people whos code he tagged, without any RFC or public discussion, without documenting what his tags mean or any future strategy towards making use of them.

Quoted 5 lines · Philippe Ombredanne

The benefits now and later:
- no distraction with licensing boilerplate cr*p in patches and files
- no guessing licensing needed when sending a patch
- anyone can grep the kernel tree for licensing, no extra tool needed
- Greg must feel really good about deleting so much things for once

This patch didn't delete anything, it added random notes.

I see now Greg deletes things from files he maintains which is even worse, given that the kernel tree doesn't document anywhere what these tags actually mean.

So he deletes a lot of license tags and replaces them with tags he puts a great significance on, but which aren't defined. A quick googles shows some Linuxfoundation web page defines them, but they could change them any time they want, nevermind that we don't even have a reference to them either.

The documentation of this process is lagging the patches, as usually happens, sorry about that.

Thomas is working on a document to describe the process, and what a file should contain, based on the work he has been doing. This was discussed at the kernel summit, and sorry for it not getting out wider than that audience, things take time, which is why I was only touching my subsystems with the "general license cleanups" at the moment until his document was ready.

Hopefully a draft of it will go out today, Thomas?

SPDX is an industry-wide accepted set of tags for all licenses, some projects have been using it for years (like Uboot). These are not going to change randomly, and again, the document that Thomas has will describe these in detail.

sorry for the confusion, it was not intended at all, but it what happens in time with distributed developers, all working at different rates on different parts of the tree.

Christoph:

I am not speaking for Greg but let me highlight some issues and benefits as I chipped in a bit to help:

Some data points in the 4.14.rc7 kernel:
- there are 64,742 distinct license statements
... in 114,597 blocks of text
... in 42,602 files
- license statements represent 480,455 lines of text
- licenses are worded in 1,015 different ways
- there are about 85 distinct licenses, the bulk being the GPL

NB: All of these tallies were computed with scancode-toolkit [1]

License text lines represent about 14.7% of all source comments. (using a CLOC to count comment lines)

Quoted 1 line

From an engineering perspective this feels to me as pure madness,

unless everyone in kernel land is in love with legalese!

I like to think of it this way:

Licensing is important but repetitive long boilerplate in patches and in every file is just a noisy distraction from the code substance.

Imagine if the kernel had 500 versions of a printf() function? Maintainers would refactor the hell of it to use a few functions.

Replacing the boilerplate with licensing ids is exactly the same:
a sane refactoring to remove duplicated boilerplate.

In the end and ideally there should be no more than one line of licensing info per file, so no more than 70Kish: so there are about 400K lines of boilerplate to remove.

The benefits now and later:
- no distraction with licensing boilerplate cr*p in patches and files

Note also that beside the kernel, U-Boot has adopted the same approach for quite a while, and in the application world the Eclipse

Lets look at random file in usb:

// SPDX-License-Identifier: GPL-2.0+
/*
* Driver for SMSC USB3503 USB 2.0 hub controller driver *
* Copyright (c) 2012-2013 Dongjin Kim ([email protected]) */
...
MODULE_LICENSE("GPL");

...do we agree that this is nowhere near distration-free? Ugly // comment that screams for attention, away from other copyright info, it hurts your eyes...

This would be improvement:

/*
* Driver for SMSC USB3503 USB 2.0 hub controller driver *
* Copyright (c) 2012-2013 Dongjin Kim ([email protected]) *
* SPDX-License-Identifier: GPL-2.0+
*/

...but what is above is just uuuugly.

...as is MODULE_LICENSE having completely different tags from SPDX.

This would be even better:

/*
* Driver for SMSC USB3503 USB 2.0 hub controller driver *
* Copyright (c) 2012-2013 Dongjin Kim ([email protected]) */
...
SPDX_MODULE_LICENSE("GPL-2.0+")

So yes, SPDX can be improvement. But in current implementation it is not.

Quoted 10 lines

This would be even better:

/*
* Driver for SMSC USB3503 USB 2.0 hub controller driver *
* Copyright (c) 2012-2013 Dongjin Kim ([email protected]) */
...
SPDX_MODULE_LICENSE("GPL-2.0+")

Quoted 2 lines

So yes, SPDX can be improvement. But in current implementation it is not.

Again, as people seem to keep still missing this point, Linus asked for the format to look like it does today, using // at the top. Thomas and I originally did it first the way with the SPDX line in the big comment block.

If you don't like the format, complain and convince him otherwise, you are not getting anywhere by responding to this old topic about it again.

Having it be the first line of the file is good, it's obvious, and stands out, which is the point, you want it to, it's a license :)

[Linus Torvalds...]

Quoted 2 lines

Having it be the first line of the file is good, it's obvious, and stands out, which is the point, you want it to, it's a license :)

What is good about that? License is about the least interesting thing about the file. Point of SPDX conversion (see the mail I was replying to?) was to make license information _less_ intrusive, not more. Tools can find SPDX anywhere in the file for the people that really care.

That's how it works in U-Boot, which people are using as example of reasonable SPDX conversion:

/*
* Copyright (c) 2012 The Chromium OS Authors. All rights reserved.
* Copyright (c) 2010-2011 NVIDIA Corporation
* NVIDIA Corporation <www.nvidia.com>
*
* SPDX-License-ers/ d

.c: GPL-2.0+
*/

Hi!

Quoted 13 lines

Quoted 10 lines

This would be even better:

/*
* Driver for SMSC USB3503 USB 2.0 hub controller driver *
* Copyright (c) 2012-2013 Dongjin Kim ([email protected]) */
...
SPDX_MODULE_LICENSE("GPL-2.0+")

Quoted 2 lines

So yes, SPDX can be improvement. But in current implementation it is not.

Quoted 8 lines

Again, as people seem to keep still missing this point, Linus asked for the format to look like it does today, using // at the top. Thomas and I originally did it first the way with the SPDX line in the big comment block.

If you don't like the format, complain and convince him otherwise, you are not getting anywhere by responding to this old topic about it again.

Hey, Linus. This // SPDX at the begining of file looks really ugly. Can we get something that looks less bad?

And BTW I responded to this uglyness before, but you just tried to make me shut up, and then did not reply. Given what quality you normally expect from patch submitters, you are doing pretty poor job here.

Quoted 2 lines

Having it be the first line of the file is good, it's obvious, and stands out, which is the point, you want it to, it's a license :)

What is good about that? License is about the least interesting thing about the file. Point of SPDX conversion (see the mail I was replying to?) was to make license information _less_ intrusive, not more. Tools can find SPDX anywhere in the file for the people that really care.

That's how it works in U-Boot, which people are using as example of reasonable SPDX conversion:

/*
* Copyright (c) 2012 The Chromium OS Authors. All rights reserved.
* Copyright (c) 2010-2011 NVIDIA Corporation
* NVIDIA Corporation <www.nvidia.com>
*
* SPDX-License-Identifier: GPL-2.0+
*/

Pavel

Signature · 2 lines

(english) http://www.livejournal.com/~pavelmachek
(cesky, pictures) http://atrey.karlin.mff.cuni.cz/~pavel/picture/horses/blog.html

Quoted 10 lines · Alan Cox

Quoted 5 lines

Given that it had no license text on it at all, it "defaults" to GPLv2, so the GPLv2 SPDX identifier was added to it.

No copyright was changed, nothing at all happened except we explicitly list the license of the file, instead of it being "implicit" before.

Well if Christoph owns the copyright (if there is one) and he has stated he believes it is too trivial to copyright then it needs an SPDX tag that indicates the rightsholder has stated it's too trivial to copyright and (by estoppel) revoked any right they might have to pursue a claim.

If Cristoph has revoked any right to pursue a claim, then he's also legally given up the right to complain if, say, Bradley Kuhn starting distributing a version with a GPLv3 permission statement --- or if Greg K-H adds a GPLv2 SPDX identifier. :-)

Quoted 20 lines · Darrick J. Wong

Quoted 19 lines · Greg Kroah-Hartman

Quoted 1 line · Christoph Hellwig

NAK, for both the libxfs patch and the kernel one.

What libxfs patch? And what "kernel one" are you referring to here?

Quoted 2 lines

I wrote the file and it has no copyright header because it conatians trivial, non-copyrightable code.

What file exactly?

And from what I know, there is nothing that is "non-copyrightable".

And this isn't changing the copyright of _ANYTHING_ it is just putting the explicit license of the file, on each file in the kernel, because it needs to be tracked.

Quoted 2 lines

I don't know why people think they can touch license information on files I've written without even asking me.

Quoted 5 lines

Quoted 3 lines

Nothing was changed, the license should be the exact same as it was before. But as I don't know what file you are referring to here, it's a bit hard to determine what you are talking about exactly :(

fs/xfs/libxfs/xfs_cksum.h

Given that it had no license text on it at all, it "defaults" to GPLv2, so the GPLv2 SPDX identifier was added to it.

No copyright was changed, nothing at all happened except we explicitly list the license of the file, instead of it being "implicit" before.

Quoted 21 lines · Greg Kroah-Hartman

Quoted 20 lines · Darrick J. Wong

Quoted 19 lines · Greg Kroah-Hartman

Quoted 1 line · Christoph Hellwig

NAK, for both the libxfs patch and the kernel one.

What libxfs patch? And what "kernel one" are you referring to here?

Quoted 2 lines

I wrote the file and it has no copyright header because it conatians trivial, non-copyrightable code.

What file exactly?

And from what I know, there is nothing that is "non-copyrightable".

And this isn't changing the copyright of _ANYTHING_ it is just putting the explicit license of the file, on each file in the kernel, because it needs to be tracked.

Quoted 2 lines

I don't know why people think they can touch license information on files I've written without even asking me.

Quoted 8 lines

Quoted 5 lines

Quoted 3 lines

Nothing was changed, the license should be the exact same as it was before. But as I don't know what file you are referring to here, it's a bit hard to determine what you are talking about exactly :(

fs/xfs/libxfs/xfs_cksum.h

Given that it had no license text on it at all, it "defaults" to GPLv2, so the GPLv2 SPDX identifier was added to it.

I'll point out here that this file is shared with a userspace package that has a mixed LGPL/GPL code base, so even if we disregard what Christoph says, this file could actually be LGPL (like fs/xfs/libxfs/xfs_fs.h) and not GPL. So from that perspective alone, your process on deciding what license tag should be used is flawed and these changes needed, at minimum, maintainer review.

IMO, unannounced, unreviewed tree wide change via a back-door commits sent straight to Linus reek of an attempt to avoid review and oversight.

And that is *completely unacceptible* when making claims about important details like licenses for *code you do not know anything about*.

We have a documented process for a reason: to stop shit like this from happening.

Quoted 2 lines

No copyright was changed, nothing at all happened except we explicitly list the license of the file, instead of it being "implicit" before.

You keep saying "no copyright has changed", despite being given an explicit statement by the code author that this is *exactly what you have done*.

When a file does not have a license, again, all lawyers I have worked with said it is implicitly GPLv2

Again, no, the copyright was not changed. Whom ever held the original copyright still holds it today.