Re: [PATCH v2] gpu/drm_memory: fix a few warnings

From: J Lovejoy <opensource@jilayne.com>
To: Thomas Gleixner <tglx@linutronix.de>
Cc: Qian Cai <cai@lca.pw>, Ilia Mirkin <imirkin@alum.mit.edu>,
	Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>,
	David Airlie <airlied@linux.ie>, Daniel Vetter <daniel@ffwll.ch>,
	Maarten Lankhorst <maarten.lankhorst@linux.intel.com>,
	Sean Paul <sean@poorly.run>,
	joe@perches.com, linux-spdx@vger.kernel.org,
	dri-devel <dri-devel@lists.freedesktop.org>,
	LKML <linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org>,
	rfontana@redhat.com,
	Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>,
	Jonathan Corbet <corbet@lwn.net>,
	Greg KH <gregkh@linuxfoundation.org>
Subject: Re: [PATCH v2] gpu/drm_memory: fix a few warnings
Date: Tue, 9 Jul 2019 21:42:57 -0600	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <472DABBB-81E5-4E79-9910-BA3C26936B40@jilayne.com> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <alpine.DEB.2.21.1907082150170.1961@nanos.tec.linutronix.de>

> On Jul 8, 2019, at 1:57 PM, Thomas Gleixner <tglx@linutronix.de> wrote:
> 
> On Mon, 8 Jul 2019, Qian Cai wrote:
>> On Mon, 2019-07-08 at 15:21 -0400, Ilia Mirkin wrote:
>>>> -/**
>>>> +// SPDX-License-Identifier: MIT
>>>> +/*
>>>>   * \file drm_memory.c
>>>>   * Memory management wrappers for DRM
>>>>   *
>>>> @@ -12,25 +13,6 @@
>>>>   * Copyright 1999 Precision Insight, Inc., Cedar Park, Texas.
>>>>   * Copyright 2000 VA Linux Systems, Inc., Sunnyvale, California.
>>>>   * All Rights Reserved.
>>>> - *
>>>> - * Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a
>>>> - * copy of this software and associated documentation files (the
>>>> "Software"),
>>>> - * to deal in the Software without restriction, including without
>>>> limitation
>>>> - * the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense,
>>>> - * and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the
>>>> - * Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:
>>>> - *
>>>> - * The above copyright notice and this permission notice (including the
>>>> next
>>>> - * paragraph) shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of
>>>> the
>>>> - * Software.
>>>> - *
>>>> - * THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS
>>>> OR
>>>> - * IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY,
>>>> - * FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT.  IN NO EVENT SHALL
>>>> - * VA LINUX SYSTEMS AND/OR ITS SUPPLIERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES
>>>> OR
>>> 
>>> This talks about VA Linux Systems and/or its suppliers, while the MIT
>>> licence talks about authors or copyright holders.
> 
> That's looks lika a valid substitution and does not change the meaning of
> the license, AFAICT. 

As of the 3.6 release of the SPDX License List, we will have added markup to denote that the name in the disclaimer can be changed and still considered a match. This is a common scenario in other licenses (like the BSD family), but I don’t think we’d come across it until the work on the kernel and adding SPDX identifiers. So, yes, MIT would be the correct SPDX identifier here as of 3.6 (which will be posted in a few days).

For reference, the SPDX License List matching guidelines can be found here: https://spdx.org/spdx-license-list/matching-guidelines - see Guideline 2.1.3 specifically. Replaceable text is marked up in the master files that comprise the SPDX License List according the the XML schema and then displayed in color coded text on the website pages (see, for example, BSD-3-Clause - https://spdx.org/licenses/BSD-3-Clause.html

Of course, if anyone finds any other license text that deserves this kind of accommodation, you can always make a PR here: https://github.com/spdx/license-list-XML :)

thanks,
Jilayne
SPDX legal team co-lead