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
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