On 8/2/19 09:59, Roland Hieber wrote: > On Fri, Feb 08, 2019 at 06:48:26AM +0100, Oleksij Rempel wrote: >> Hi Roland, >> >> please remove deprecated license headers in same patch. > > I decided to leave them to record the original author's intent. There > are several variations on the GPL headers in the project, the one > extreme is the full GPL license header including a warranty disclaimer, > but the other extreme is only a "GPLv2" and nothing more. We can decide > on the project level to apply the warranty disclaimer. But by removing > the license headers from individual files, the original author intent is > lost – maybe the didn't want to include the disclaimer, maybe they > didn't care, in any case it is not in our possibility to decide over > their copyright matters and for most of the cases it is too late to > track some of the people down and ask them. > > This all becomes important when someone forks our files to a new > project. And if that someone does not know what the SPDX license tags > actually mean, it's better to have the original documentation on the > file level. > > I noticed that Linux usually removes the license headers and only keeps > the copyright lines, but I wasn't able to find any reason for that. Do > you have more insight here? (Obligatory IANAL) With the copyright, the author states their right to deal as they see fit with the source code. For example they may relicense. Replacing the copyright with a SPDX-License-Identifier won't preserve this information. The license itself grants rights to others and, if it's a standard one, could be referenced by the Identifier, while the full text is reproduced only once at some central location (see my LICENSES directory patch below). Cheers Ahmad > > - Roland > -- Pengutronix e.K. | | Industrial Linux Solutions | http://www.pengutronix.de/ | Peiner Str. 6-8, 31137 Hildesheim, Germany | Phone: +49-5121-206917-0 | Amtsgericht Hildesheim, HRA 2686 | Fax: +49-5121-206917-5555 | _______________________________________________ barebox mailing list barebox@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx http://lists.infradead.org/mailman/listinfo/barebox
