[libvirt PATCH 00/20] Use SPDX-License-Identifier

[Eric Blake]

On 8/4/20 12:33 PM, Daniel P. Berrangé wrote:
> On Tue, Aug 04, 2020 at 07:22:40PM +0200, Ján Tomko wrote:
>> Replace the license blurb in every single file with:
>>    SPDX-License-Identifier: <human-readable-string>
>> Coincidentally, this is also machine readable.
> 
> I've requested legal clarification previously on whether doing this
> kind of replacement is possible. The response I got was that it is
> NOT acceptable unless you have the permission of all copyright
> holders on the source files. The terms of the GPL require that
> license notices are not modified. Replacing this header with the
> SPDX tag counts as modification, even though its essentially
> just a different way of presenting the same information.
> 
> NB, the fact that the kernel did such a conversion is not on its
> own, a sufficient ok for doing it in libvirt, as we don't see
> the prep work/analysis/discussions that led into the kernel's
> change.
> 
> So NACK to this change.

While wholesale replacement of the text is legally problematic, _adding_ 
the SPDX tag (in addition to what is already present), should not be an 
issue, if you want to respin a lighter-weight patch along those lines.

-- 
Eric Blake, Principal Software Engineer
Red Hat, Inc.           +1-919-301-3226
Virtualization:  qemu.org | libvirt.org