Re: [PATCH v2 6/7] vmw_balloon: update copyright message

[Greg Kroah-Hartman]

On Thu, Jun 14, 2018 at 05:33:46AM +0000, Nadav Amit wrote:
> at 10:24 PM, Greg Kroah-Hartman <gregkh@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> 
> > On Wed, Jun 13, 2018 at 06:54:11AM -0700, Nadav Amit wrote:
> >> Removing the paragraph about writing to the Free Software Foundation's
> >> mailing address from the sample GPL notice according to checkpatch
> >> request.
> >> 
> >> In addition, updating the year and adding a license tag.
> >> 
> >> Reviewed-by: Xavier Deguillard <xdeguillard@xxxxxxxxxx>
> >> Signed-off-by: Nadav Amit <nadav.amit@xxxxxxxxx>
> >> ---
> >> drivers/misc/vmw_balloon.c | 7 ++-----
> >> 1 file changed, 2 insertions(+), 5 deletions(-)
> >> 
> >> diff --git a/drivers/misc/vmw_balloon.c b/drivers/misc/vmw_balloon.c
> >> index 400a1ccefc8e..b982059ce7b7 100644
> >> --- a/drivers/misc/vmw_balloon.c
> >> +++ b/drivers/misc/vmw_balloon.c
> >> @@ -1,7 +1,8 @@
> >> +// SPDX-License-Identifier: GPL-2.0
> >> /*
> >>  * VMware Balloon driver.
> >>  *
> >> - * Copyright (C) 2000-2014, VMware, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
> >> + * Copyright (C) 2000-2018, VMware, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
> >>  *
> >>  * This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it
> >>  * under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the
> >> @@ -13,10 +14,6 @@
> >>  * NON INFRINGEMENT.  See the GNU General Public License for more
> >>  * details.
> > 
> > You still have a lot of boiler-plate text in here that can be removed.
> > Please do so.
> 
> I will remove the maintainers, since it is really unsuitable.
> 
> But what else do you want me to remove? This is a standard GPL license. If I
> am required to remove the GPL license, I will have to run checks to ensure
> it is appropriate.

Yes, all of the license text should be removed.  Right now we have 700+
differnt wordings of "This file is released under the GPL" in the kernel
tree, and we need to clean that up.  Look at all of the other SPDX
cleanups we have done already to get an idea of what is needed here.

As one example, look at 0c3b34a569f8 ("USB: typec: Remove remaining
redundant license text") which can be done after the correct SPDX line
is in the file.  That's the end-goal for all kernel files.

thanks,

greg k-h