Re: Meta-question on GPL compliance of this activity

From: J Lovejoy <opensource@jilayne.com>
To: "Bradley M. Kuhn" <bkuhn@ebb.org>
Cc: Richard Fontana <rfontana@redhat.com>, linux-spdx@vger.kernel.org
Subject: Re: Meta-question on GPL compliance of this activity
Date: Wed, 22 May 2019 10:14:00 -0600	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <0995848C-11BE-47B1-86F9-F56D43541246@jilayne.com> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <20190521210833.veltn74dcgic5zmw@ebb.org>

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@ebb.org> 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/