Re: Meta-question on GPL compliance of this activity

[Allison Randal <allison@lohutok.net>]

On 5/25/19 12:56 PM, Greg KH wrote:
> 
> Again, remember we have over 65 thousand files in the kernel source
> tree.  Any single file that tries to reference them all, in any form, is
> going to be unworkable.

Yeah, we wouldn't be looking to track every single license notice change
throughout history, that wouldn't be reasonable. We want to narrow it
down to specific sets of changes that removed license notices and
replaced them with SPDX identifiers. And, ideally, display those with
the most minimal amount of information possible. It might even be
reasonable to generate the page as a list of links to the pretty diff
displays of the relevant commits, like:

https://github.com/torvalds/linux/commit/fd534e9b5fdcf9bab33c03cb3ade1a1ae5b23c20

That's the most faithful capture of the removed license notices we could
possibly provide, and is more accessible than simply saying that they're
in the git history. But, it might not satisfy the most conservative
definitions of "keep intact".

It seems like we're weighing effort against effectiveness here, but
without a clear definition of what effective means, other than our best
guess at how "keep intact" might be interpreted by someone, somewhere,
sometime.

Allison