From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S1752146AbdKKU4L (ORCPT ); Sat, 11 Nov 2017 15:56:11 -0500 Received: from mail-qt0-f195.google.com ([209.85.216.195]:55686 "EHLO mail-qt0-f195.google.com" rhost-flags-OK-OK-OK-OK) by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S1752087AbdKKU4K (ORCPT ); Sat, 11 Nov 2017 15:56:10 -0500 X-Google-Smtp-Source: AGs4zMaThRed+Tl95l/t16xWu61adseEgoTqsfsTjbXzJanpy5jSFiX9pEn/8qdHkRNJLOJj/LYV6zdiugQZSBZOHvA= MIME-Version: 1.0 From: Charlemagne Lasse Date: Sat, 11 Nov 2017 21:56:08 +0100 Message-ID: Subject: Adding LICENSES folder for REUSE To: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Cc: Greg Kroah-Hartman , carmenbianca@fsfe.org, Jonas Oberg , Masahiro Yamada Content-Type: text/plain; charset="UTF-8" Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org List-ID: X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Hi, the linux kernel is a GPL-2.0 project but is build based on files using all kinds of different licenses. It would be really nice when these licenses could be correctly referenced as described in the https://reuse.software/practices/ from the FSF. Since some people started to add the SPDX headers to some files, it might now be the right time to ask to get a LICENSES folder which will contain the separate licenses. According to the currently existing SPDX-License-Identifier, this should be at least: - GPL-1.0 - GPL-2.0 - BSD-2-Clause - BSD-3-Clause - MIT - MPL-1.1 - LGPL-2.0 - LGPL-2.1 I personally don't understand why BSD-2-Clause or MIT needs to have the copyright file stored with the copyright holder while GPL-2.0 doesn't need that. Seems to be quite wasteful and useless in a project like the Linux kernel. Especially when there are multiple copyright holders - and there are different combination in each file. Maybe the FSFE can give us some insights here. Here just two example files: - https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/tree/drivers/net/wireless/ath/ath9k/dfs.c?id=b39545684a90ef3374abc0969d64c7bc540d128d - https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/tree/drivers/net/wireless/ath/ath9k/ar9580_1p0_initvals.h?id=b39545684a90ef3374abc0969d64c7bc540d128d It would also be interesting to know from the FSFE how dual license should be handled in by the License-Filename tag. Thanks, Charlemagne Lasse