Re: Meta-question on GPL compliance of this activity

From: Greg KH <gregkh@linuxfoundation.org>
To: John Sullivan <johns@fsf.org>
Cc: J Lovejoy <opensource@jilayne.com>, linux-spdx@vger.kernel.org
Subject: Re: Meta-question on GPL compliance of this activity
Date: Sat, 1 Jun 2019 02:31:20 -0700	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <20190601093120.GA1783@kroah.com> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <87pnnydm63.fsf@wjsullivan.net>

On Fri, May 31, 2019 at 11:22:44PM -0400, John Sullivan wrote:
> Greg KH <gregkh@linuxfoundation.org> writes:
> 
> > On Wed, May 29, 2019 at 04:57:20PM -0400, John Sullivan wrote:
> >> Project copyrightholders can as always make their own decisions about
> >> questions like this. What Linux does will be looked to by others as a
> >> practice to model, so I'm interested to participate in the conversation
> >> here for that reason (I see there are also a few cases of actual FSF
> >> copyrighted materials up for consideration, so will try to watch for
> >> those but would also appreciate a ping if anyone can spare one as they
> >> come up).
> >
> > To help address any issues that you might have with your own files being
> > modified, could you please just submit a patch to add the proper SPDX
> > header and place whatever text you feel is "correct" in them?  That way
> > you know your files are fine.
> >
> > I'll gladly review and submit any patches you create for this, it would
> > be most helpful.  Same offer to any other copyright holder (Richard,
> > want to do this for all Red Hat owned files?)
> >
> 
> Yes, that is reasonable and I'll arrange for that.

Great!

> I'd like to avoid the race condition though, so also asking for any
> patches that may get circulated here to be flagged and held.

If you happen to notice them and flag them, that's fine.  But kernel
development is very much not "don't touch my file!" type of methodology.
That is what killed other open source projects, it is "first in-first
applied".

If you happen to miss any such file in these huge cleanups, that's fine,
just go back later and send a patch fixing it up to be whatever you
want, but we can't special-case anyone here, it's just not going to be
viable.

Just take an hour or so today and knock them out, you all already have
the list of all of your copyrighted files, so this shouldn't be much
work at all.  I'll be glad to queue that up with the rest of these types
of changes.

thanks,

greg k-h