Hello Richard,

On 9/5/21 11:53 PM, Richard Fontana wrote:

On Sun, Sep 5, 2021 at 9:25 AM Alejandro Colomar [off-list ref] wrote:

quoted

To simplify understanding which license applies to each file,
let's use SPDX markings, which are simple, informative, and
commonly used in many projects.
Let's also follow REUSE <https://reuse.software/> conventions.

I assime GPL-1.0-or-later is the closest thing to GPL_NOVERSION_ONELINE,
which I couldn't find anywhere.

That's pretty unlikely what any contributor to these files intended,
but maybe harmless. But the inclusion of the GPL version 1 text (the
logic of which I understand, given the desire to follow REUSE)
emphasizes the awkwardness. If this were my project, I'd probably just
recast these as GPL-2.0-or-later (which is generally understood to be
permissible). Socially, I think by the early years of the kernel, GPL
version 1 was largely forgotten, and "the GPL" had come to mean GPL
version 2, or in some contexts GPL version 2 and (for a long time)
hypothetical future versions of the GPL.

Technically, we could update 1.0+ to 2.0+, since it's a subset of it.
I didn't want to reduce rights artificially before knowing what 
GPL_NOVERSION_ONELINE is.  But if the general understanding is that 
authors wanted GPL 2, I'm fine with it.  I'll do that in a separate 
commit for now (which will remove the 1.0+ license text and change the 
identifiers), however, instead of amending.

One other thing:

quoted

-.\" Copyright 1995-2000 David Engel (david@ods.com)
-.\" Copyright 1995 Rickard E. Faith (faith@cs.unc.edu)
-.\" Copyright 2000 Ben Collins (bcollins@debian.org)
-.\"    Redone for GLibc 2.2
-.\" Copyright 2000 Jakub Jelinek (jakub@redhat.com)
-.\"    Corrected.
-.\" and Copyright (C) 2012, 2016, Michael Kerrisk [off-list ref]
-.\"
-.\" %%%LICENSE_START(GPL_NOVERSION_ONELINE)
-.\" Do not restrict distribution.
-.\" May be distributed under the GNU General Public License
-.\" %%%LICENSE_END
+.\" SPDX-FileCopyrightText: 1995-2000, David Engel [off-list ref]
+.\" SPDX-FileCopyrightText: 1995, Rickard E. Faith [off-list ref]
+.\" SPDX-FileCopyrightText: 2000, Ben Collins [off-list ref]
+.\" SPDX-FileCopyrightText: 2000, Jakub Jelinek [off-list ref]
+.\" SPDX-FileCopyrightText: 2012, 2016, Michael Kerrisk [off-list ref]

I haven't followed what the kernel has been doing around use of SPDX
expressions in source files for a long time. Is it now routinely
replacing original copyright notices with these SPDX-FileCopyrightText
statements? Without permission from the authors, this feels
questionable to me, as (in theory) this could have some sort of
unexpected legal consequence or violate the expectations of the
authors. In at least some cases, the original copyright notice might
be a formally valid copyright notice under US law (or perhaps, less
likely I think, the law of some other jurisdiction) while the
transformed version wouldn't be. To be sure, it's unlikely to matter
for various reasons, but I just hope someone has thought about this.

I'm not an expert in legal matters, and also don't know very much what 
other projects have been doing about this.

I reformatted some of the copyright lines in the following ways:

- Transform () emails into <> for consistency.  Not a meaningful change.

- Add commas and spaces for consistency.  Not a meaningful change.

- Remove the "Copyright (c) " prefix, since I understand that 
"SPDX-FileCopyrightText: " replaces it, I hope both semantically and 
legally.  I hope this is not a meaningful change, but I'd like advise 
from experts (that's why I CCd some SPDX people).

- When dates were so specific to include the day, I simplified to only 
the year.  That's slightly meaningful, maybe too much...  But I thought 
that knowing the exact day a page was written isn't important 30 years 
after.

- I consciously removed text in a couple copyright of lines saying "All 
rights reserved." when the license was GPL.  It was simply wrong.  The 
GPL is already giving away rights, so they are not reserved.

Ah, I also see that the SPDX speaks of SPDX-FileCopyrightText :
https://spdx.github.io/spdx-spec/appendix-IX-file-tags/

But in the examples there, it looks like the hypothetical original
copyright notice is preserved and just gets "SPDX-FIleCopyrightText"
prepended. Here you're transforming the original copyright notice into
a "date, name" string.

Well, it's mostly what a copyright notice was originally meant to be, I 
think; copyright holder and date.  SPDX only formats it more consistently.

Thanks,

Alex


-- 
Alejandro Colomar
Linux man-pages comaintainer; https://www.kernel.org/doc/man-pages/
http://www.alejandro-colomar.es/