Richard, glad to see you on this list!
Richard Fontana wrote:
> I have recently heard the argument that replacing a more or less standard
> old-school GNU license notice, or any sort of nonstandard pre-SPDX
> alternative human-oriented notice, with an SPDX license identifier string,
> without explicit permission from the copyright holder, complies with this
> condition, because in substance the SPDX string embodies equivalent
> licensing information (and has benefits of its own over the old-school
> notice). However, more conservative interpreters of GPLv2, including some
> copyright holders, might argue otherwise.
I think we do have to worry about more conservative interpreters, esp. given
that copyright holders are not giving their consent for these notice changes.
There was consensus at the meeting in Barcelona that moving all the notices
to a single file to live inside the Linux tree "somewhere" with entries like:
Filenames: a.c, b.c, c.c contained this notice:
NOTICE
which was replaced with SPDX_IDENTIFIER on DATE.
and that such was a fine and acceptable way to address even the most
disagreeable and litigious conservative interpreters, and that such
was a necessary step to avoid compliance infractions on this issue.
Related to this, Allison noted on May 8th on this list:
>> Are you [Thomas] automatically logging which files were modified by each
>> pattern match, for the legally conservative hack we talked about,
>> preserving a historical record of altered license notices in a doc file?
IIUC, Thomas indicated in that thread that he could generate that information
later, but given that we already have consensus on the idea, it seems to me
it would be better if the patches themselves contained the moving of the
notice text from the individual files into the single file, rather than
reconstructing it on the back-end. Richard, what do you think about that?
--
Bradley M. Kuhn
Pls. support the charity where I work, Software Freedom Conservancy:
https://sfconservancy.org/supporter/
