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

[Neal Gompa]

On Tue, Aug 4, 2020 at 1:23 PM Ján Tomko <jtomko at redhat.com> wrote:
>
> Replace the license blurb in every single file with:
>   SPDX-License-Identifier: <human-readable-string>
> Coincidentally, this is also machine readable.
>
> This identifies the few places that use GPL-3.0 (syntax-check),
> some places that mistakenly changed the blurb
> (patches 1/20 and 4/20).
>
> The other variations were period vs. semicolon at various places
> and double vs. single space before 'If not, write...'
>

I'm really not a fan of this. While I don't mind the idea of having
the machine-readable identifier, you're eliminating one more venue in
which someone would *actually* learn about the license and have the
opportunity to learn about the philosophy of Free Software. I know
that Linux and systemd have already done this, but I feel like this is
a huge mistake.

One of the reasons why the license header exists the way it does is to
inform people of the concept of Free Software as a whole whenever they
look at the sources, in the hope that someone would be interested and
make their own.

Finally, SPDX-License-Identifier tag is not stable, as the SPDX
license identifiers themselves are not stable (they are versioned, and
change across versions). I would really prefer that versioned tags be
used if we used it, since that allows for the correct reference to
work.

For example, I have done this in one project:

# Fedora-License-Identifier: GPLv2+
# SPDX-2.0-License-Identifier: GPL-2.0+
# SPDX-3.0-License-Identifier: GPL-2.0-or-later





-- 
真実はいつも一つ！/ Always, there's only one truth!