On Tue, Nov 7, 2017 at 8:28 PM, Christoph Hellwig <hch@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > On Tue, Nov 07, 2017 at 02:15:26PM -0500, Theodore Ts'o wrote: >> On Tue, Nov 07, 2017 at 06:46:58PM +0000, Alan Cox wrote: >> > > 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. :-) > > > 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". 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) >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 - 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] - legalese lovers need to find another codebase to satisfy their addiction Note also that beside the kernel, U-Boot has adopted the same approach for quite a while, and in the application world the Eclipse Foundation, JavaScript NPMs and Rubygems are some examples that adopted SPDX license ids to simplify and clarify licensing documentation. [1] https://github.com/nexB/scancode-toolkit [2] https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/tree/drivers/w1/slaves/w1_therm.c?h=v4.14-rc8#n8 -- Cordially Philippe Ombredanne -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-xfs" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
