[coreboot] License headers

[Patrick Georgi via coreboot]

Hi,

we had some fun discussion a while back about the license headers we
use in our tree. Asking legal experts, they proposed we go for keeping
the usual GPL license header intact, only stripping the FSF address
(which gave the most churn on licenses in our tree, and as you can see
in the commit below, we didn't even do a good job on keeping those
current, or uniform).

The rationale is that there are tools and work flows that expect
license markers to be in some kind of 'normal form', and that's the
one that exists for the GPL.

Just like they typically have no opinion about firmware development
matters (although lawyers are a weird bunch, some even write great
graphics card drivers!), I have little to say about their opinion on
license matters, so my proposal is to follow expert advice.

http://review.coreboot.org/#/c/9233/ is my work in progress towards
that goal. It's not complete yet, and I'd love to have some automated
verification in our 'lint' tool set to make sure that no FSF addresses
creep in once we exorcised them.

I deliberately kept util/kconfig as-is to keep changes compared to its
upstream to a minimum.


Patrick
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Re: [coreboot] License headers

[Matt Taggart]

Patrick Georgi via coreboot writes:

 http://review.coreboot.org/#/c/9233/ is my work in progress towards
 that goal. It's not complete yet, and I'd love to have some automated
 verification in our 'lint' tool set to make sure that no FSF addresses
 creep in once we exorcised them.

I asked the FOSSology.org people (cc'd) if they could scan current git on 
the public FOSSology server hosted by University of Nebraska at Omaha. The 
results are here

  https://fossology.ist.unomaha.edu/?mod=browseupload=284

specifically click on License Browser or Copyright/Email/URL (you will 
need javascript turned on for the site)

I have asked if there is a way to explicitly search for the FSF addresses, 
that is a very common problem and would be good to solve.

If it would be useful to run on a regular basis they have ways to automate 
that, just ask on the cc'd mailing list. (also future runs will be fast 
because it only has to scan things that have changed)

Also while searching I found this LKML thread

  http://www.gossamer-threads.com/lists/linux/kernel/1794869

that might be a good lightweight way to automate scanning just for the FSF 
address issue.

-- 
Matt Taggart
m...@lackof.org



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