Re: [patch 16/25] treewide: Replace GPLv2 boilerplate/reference with SPDX - rule 16

[Thomas Gleixner <tglx@linutronix.de>]

Richard,

On Mon, 20 May 2019, Richard Fontana wrote:
> First, from an SPDX conformance perspective (I assume this whole
> exercise aims to be SPDX conformant, although I'm not really clear on

Yes, the aim is to have a SPDX clean source tree, which has removed all the
randomly chosen boilerplate/references etc.

The review process here is conducted to actually spot the cases where the
machine decided (on whatever base) something which is not 100% clear.

We sort out these cases and we need to do further investigation, talk to
copyright holders or eventually come up with some extra SPDX tag which
expresses the magic extra bits, in this case the disclaimer.

> GPLv3 says: "for material you add to a covered work, you may (if
> authorized by the copyright holders of that material) supplement the
> terms of this License with terms:
> a) Disclaiming warranty or limiting liability differently from the
> terms of sections 15 and 16 of this License;" , which is treated as an
> allowable additional restriction. And this codified an occasional
> practice under GPLv2 which I believe the FSF had authorized. So if one
> copyright holder decided to tack on the BSD disclaimer language to an
> otherwise standard GPLv2 notice, that presumably should be treated
> like an additional restriction, which needs to be left in place, and
> perhaps even the appropriate thing is to define an SPDX identifier to
> account for the additional language. (Given the way "exception" is
> sort of defined at https://spdx.org/licenses/exceptions-index.html it
> might not be appropriate to use the "WITH" syntax.)

Right. I'm not a SPDX wizard, but I think we need a new SPDX id,
e.g. BSD-DISCLAIMER or something to that effect and then have

SPDX-License-Identifier: GPL-2.0-or-later AND BSD-DISCLAIMER

as the concluded license, which allows us to remove both the GPL
boilerplate and the disclaimer. Right now we can't do anything because the
BSD-DISCLAIMER id does not exist.

As you explained above something like this is needed anyway as it's going
to happen with GPLv3 as well and it seems it's sufficiently wide spread
even in the kernel code.

Thanks,

	tglx