SPDX License Identifier Only and Full Copy?

[Thomas Doerfler]

Hello,

I just want to speak up here. I talked with Sebastian today and I really
tend to keep the license text in each file.

Rational:

- With the BSD license, anyone can pick any file from the RTEMS repo and
use/modify it in any project (and this is fine). The original authors
(and their copyright) are listed in the file, but the only pointer to
the legal part is the "SPDX identifier". I am not sure whether this is a
legally binding "tag" and whether this tag is clear to any user.

- Strictly seen, it is not even forbidden to remove the "SPDX
identifier", because it is not part of the BSD-2-clause-license, it's
just a pointer to it. In the end we might result in code drifting around
without license information, which we all do not want to see.

As you all know I am not a lawyer (and don't want to be), but my gut
say's the extra lines in the top of each file are worth their storage.
And anybody opening a RTEMS source file (even when it has been taken to
a different project) should see what he has.

---------

If you have different reasons to replace the header and just leave the
identifier I a will go with it and it's fine for me. But my tendency
is... leave it in.

Kind regards,

Thomas.

Am 20.02.20 um 08:30 schrieb Sebastian Huber:
> Hello,
> 
> On 18/02/2020 16:58, Gedare Bloom wrote:
>>>>> I suggest to use a master COPYING file and use file headers without
>>>>> the
>>>>> full license text.
>>>>>
>>>>> https://lists.rtems.org/pipermail/devel/2018-December/024198.html
>>>> It would be nice to get some feedback here.
>>>
>>> I'm generally ok with just the spdx and copyright statements.
>>>
>> I'm also fine with the master COPYING, spdx-tag, and individual
>> copyrights in files.
>>
>> I should make a note to take a pass over "my" files to relicense them.
>> Does anyone have any script/tools for making that easy?
> 
> I talked with Thomas and he is not in favour of a removal of the licence
> text. Not everyone knows what an SPDX-Licence-Identifier is and that
> this means the file is covered by the reference license. The
> BSD-2-Clause license text is quite clear and not long. For us it is
> important that it is very clear that our contributions are without
> warranties and so on. This information should be also clear if files are
> transferred out of the RTEMS context to other projects.
> 

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