Re: [PATCH V2] license-rules.rst and LICENSES: Use only spdx version 3 with -only and -or-later

From: Thomas Gleixner
Date: Wed Aug 22 2018 - 15:17:58 EST


On Wed, 22 Aug 2018, Linus Torvalds wrote:
> On Wed, Aug 22, 2018 at 11:01 AM Joe Perches <joe@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> >
> > How likely is it that this is applied at rc1?
>
> I'm staying out of the crazy license name bikeshedding, so it's going
> to be up to the people who have decided they care.
>
> I think whoever *did* care and argued for the change to the SPDX
> format is a hopeless wanker. "GPL-2.0{-only,-or-later}" is in no ways
> better than the "GPL-2.0{,+}" that was in an earlier version of the
> SPDX spec
>
> So I want nothing at all to do with pointless patches. Life is too
> short to deal with this.
>
> Other people disagree, so I expect I will get these kinds of stupid
> noise patches through the usual channels.

I'm not a great fan of that change either. We have settled on a well
documented and machine readable format. External tools have to be able to
deal with SPDX versions anyway and if we do this now, then we have the next
round of pointless churn in a year when the SPDX folks decide to rename yet
another license identifier which is used in the kernel.

Thanks,

tglx