Date: Sun, 25 Mar 2018 12:34:28 -0500 From: Pedro Giffuni <pfg@FreeBSD.org> To: rgrimes@freebsd.org Cc: Mark Peek <mp@freebsd.org>, src-committers@freebsd.org, svn-src-all@freebsd.org, svn-src-head@freebsd.org Subject: Re: svn commit: r331510 - in head: share/man/man4 sys/conf sys/dev/vmware/vmci sys/modules/vmware sys/modules/vmware/vmci Message-ID: <3abca0b5-8820-b937-d468-1021e3b7bbe6@FreeBSD.org> In-Reply-To: <201803251603.w2PG3KLQ041797@pdx.rh.CN85.dnsmgr.net> References: <201803251603.w2PG3KLQ041797@pdx.rh.CN85.dnsmgr.net>
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On 25/03/2018 11:03, Rodney W. Grimes wrote: >> >> On 25/03/2018 06:49, Rodney W. Grimes wrote: >>>> On Sat, Mar 24, 2018 at 6:27 PM, Rodney W. Grimes < >>>> freebsd@pdx.rh.cn85.dnsmgr.net> wrote: >>>> >>>>>> Author: mp >>>>>> Date: Sun Mar 25 00:57:00 2018 >>>>>> New Revision: 331510 >>>>>> URL: https://svnweb.freebsd.org/changeset/base/331510 >>>>> These files do not each contain a usable copyright, though >>>>> they seem to contain SPDX tags that indiate they should contain >>>>> a BSD 2 clause copyright. >>>> IANAL but I believe you meant "...they should contain a BSD 2 clause >>>> *license*". The files should contain a valid copyright. >>> A valid, but unusable. As the copyright is it is a full copyright >>> held by vmware without any rights to be published or redistributed >>> any any manner by anyone but vmware. >>> >>> "Copyright (c) 2018 VMware, Inc. All Rights Reserved." >>> >>> That is a restrictive copyright, allowing no one to publish, or >>> in our case, redistribute, without a further license of some form. >>> >>>> The intent of my commit and the author were to use the implied SPDX version >>>> of the licenses without burdening the source code with the more heavyweight >>>> license text. Having seen SPDX in the src tree, I believed >>>> the SPDX-License-Identifier was sufficient. But, to your point, I'm not >>>> sure I have seen a discussion or a decision on it. >>> SPDX tags are purely to be treated as "advisory" and in no one imply >>> or create any license agreement. >> As happens in economics, different lawyers can have different >> interpretations. Our practices were consulted with the SPDX guys but >> other projects have different practices. >> >> While the sound practice, especially when you don't own the code, is to >> add the SPDX tag in addition to the license text, the linux developers >> are encouraging replacing it altogether with the SPDX tag. In their case >> they keep a reference to the complete license text elsewhere and they >> have some repository log where the copyright owner did the change. > They have grown use to this from the way the GPL is handled, since > the length of the body of that license would be impractical to > include. > >> For contrib code we just follow upstream. In no case can anyone other >> than the copyright owner clarify, or otherwise change, a license. > That does bring a question of why this code is not either on > a vendor import branch, or in contrib? > > Can you point to any files in /usr/src that lack a full and complete > standalone license? Sans perhaps some GPL code that has a pointer > to COPYING and files that can not such as Makefile and .mk's. There are some. Here is an outstanding example: usr.sbin/bhyve/bhyvegc.c FWIW, the one time I did a change I added a copyright disclaimer to the commit log to avoid future issues: https://svnweb.freebsd.org/base?view=revision&revision=318788 Cheers, Pedro.
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