Re: [patch 2/7] LICENSES: Add the GPL 2.0 license

[Thomas Gleixner]

Jonas,

On Thu, 16 Nov 2017, Jonas Oberg wrote:

> Hi Thomas,
> 
> I do appreciate your work on this, it's a welcome addition!
> 
> > +SPDX-License-Identifier: GPL-2.0  // GPLv2 only
> > +SPDX-License-Identifier: GPL-2.0+ // GPLv2 or later
> 
> I am concerned about this though, as the SPDX-License-Identifier is well
> known to refer to the license of the document in which it appears, and
> it would be beneficial to avoid a situation where a tool reading this
> make the assumption the license text itself it under a particular
> license. Essentially, let's avoid overloading if we can.

Makes sense

> >From my reading, there are two intentions with the above reading:
> 
>  1) To give usage guidelines and signal that for any source file, adding
>     this exact line would be a valid license identifier, and
>  2) To make the license identifiers computer understandable such that
>     tools can be updated to validate whether source code includes a
>     license identifier which corresponds to one of the licenses in
>     LICENSES/
> 
> I'd propose to not try to do both at the same time and would propose
> a 'Valid-License-Identifier' tag to meet your second criteria, and
> a 'Usage-Guidance' tag to meet your first one. The header would then
> be:
> 
> Valid-License-Identifier: GPL-2.0
> Valid-License-Identifier: GPL-2.0+
> Usage-Guidance:
>  To use this license in source code, you can use either of the following tags
>  and values:
>  .
>  SPDX-License-Identifier: GPL-2.0   // For GPLv2 only
>  SPDX-License-Identifier: GPL-2.0+  // For GPLv2 or any later version

I can live with that.

Thanks for looking over this!

       tglx