Re: Meta-question on GPL compliance of this activity

[Dominik Brodowski <linux@dominikbrodowski.net>]

On Mon, May 27, 2019 at 05:54:05PM -0400, Allison Randal wrote:
> On 5/25/19 12:56 PM, Greg KH wrote:
> > 
> > Again, remember we have over 65 thousand files in the kernel source
> > tree.  Any single file that tries to reference them all, in any form, is
> > going to be unworkable.
> 
> Yeah, we wouldn't be looking to track every single license notice change
> throughout history, that wouldn't be reasonable. We want to narrow it
> down to specific sets of changes that removed license notices and
> replaced them with SPDX identifiers. And, ideally, display those with
> the most minimal amount of information possible. It might even be
> reasonable to generate the page as a list of links to the pretty diff
> displays of the relevant commits, like:
> 
> https://github.com/torvalds/linux/commit/fd534e9b5fdcf9bab33c03cb3ade1a1ae5b23c20
> 
> That's the most faithful capture of the removed license notices we could
> possibly provide, and is more accessible than simply saying that they're
> in the git history. But, it might not satisfy the most conservative
> definitions of "keep intact".
> 
> It seems like we're weighing effort against effectiveness here, but
> without a clear definition of what effective means, other than our best
> guess at how "keep intact" might be interpreted by someone, somewhere,
> sometime.

Might it help (and reduce risks) to involve those who clearly hold copyrights
to a file, or who at least claim that they hold a copyright? In other words:
should these patches be CC'ed / BCC'ed (at least!) to those explicitly listed
as copyright holders in the files changed by each of these patches?

Thanks,
	Dominik