Richard, As you raised this concern and yet I’m noticing you continue to review the patches and sign off, am I correct to assume that you don’t think this is a big concern? thanks, Jilayne > On May 21, 2019, at 3:08 PM, Bradley M. Kuhn <bkuhn@xxxxxxx> wrote: > > 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/
