Kernel License cleanup

From: Thomas Gleixner <tglx@linutronix.de>
To: LKML <linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org>
Cc: Greg KH <gregkh@linuxfoundation.org>,
	Kate Stewart <kstewart@linuxfoundation.org>
Subject: Kernel License cleanup
Date: Mon, 6 May 2019 20:55:10 +0200 (CEST)	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <alpine.DEB.2.21.1905062040530.3334@nanos.tec.linutronix.de> (raw)

Folks,

after the initial SPDX sweep of the kernel, people have slowly started to
fixup the licensing mess. The current approach has some issues:

1) With the current rate of changes we are going to be finished in about
   10+ years from now

2) The error rate with these cleanups is frightening high. It got even
   higher since the 'run a script and fix random bits' folks have decided
   that this is a new playground. It's not because it really needs a lot of
   dilligence.

We've had a discussion at the Legal and Licensing Workshop in Barcelona and
came to the conclusion that this needs to be tackled in a larger scale
effort with massive tooling support.

I've looked into automating a lot of these conversions and there is a
halfways workable way to get at least up to 90-95% coverage without
spending insane amounts of time. The remaining 5-10% of horrors are special
cases which need a lot of thoughts anyway.

As we need help from lawyers with this, we decided to set up a dedicated
mailing list to spare those people the wonderful experience of the daily
LKML mail flooding.

The list address is: linux-spdx@vger.kernel.org

It's open and archived at: https://lore.kernel.org/linux-spdx/

If you're interested to help, please subscribe. We'll start to work there
as of tomorrow.

Thanks,

	Thomas