svn commit: r331510 - in head: share/man/man4 sys/conf sys/dev/vmware/vmci sys/modules/vmware sys/modules/vmware/vmci

[Pedro Giffuni]

On 25/03/2018 06:49, Rodney W. Grimes wrote:
>> On Sat, Mar 24, 2018 at 6:27 PM, Rodney W. Grimes <
>> freebsd at pdx.rh.cn85.dnsmgr.net> wrote:
>>
>>>> Author: mp
>>>> Date: Sun Mar 25 00:57:00 2018
>>>> New Revision: 331510
>>>> URL: https://svnweb.freebsd.org/changeset/base/331510
>>> These files do not each contain a usable copyright, though
>>> they seem to contain SPDX tags that indiate they should contain
>>> a BSD 2 clause copyright.
>>
>> IANAL but I believe you meant "...they should contain a BSD 2 clause
>> *license*". The files should contain a valid copyright.
> A valid, but unusable.  As the copyright is it is a full copyright
> held by vmware without any rights to be published or redistributed
> any any manner by anyone but vmware.
>
> 	"Copyright (c) 2018 VMware, Inc. All Rights Reserved."
>
> That is a restrictive copyright, allowing no one to publish, or
> in our case, redistribute, without a further license of some form.
>
>> The intent of my commit and the author were to use the implied SPDX version
>> of the licenses without burdening the source code with the more heavyweight
>> license text. Having seen SPDX in the src tree, I believed
>> the SPDX-License-Identifier was sufficient. But, to your point, I'm not
>> sure I have seen a discussion or a decision on it.
> SPDX tags are purely to be treated as "advisory" and in no one imply
> or create any license agreement.

As happens in economics, different lawyers can have different 
interpretations. Our practices were consulted with the SPDX guys but 
other projects have different practices.

While the sound practice, especially when you don't own the code, is to 
add the SPDX tag in addition to the license text, the linux developers 
are encouraging replacing it altogether with the SPDX tag. In their case 
they keep a reference to the complete license text elsewhere and they 
have some repository log where the copyright owner did the change.

For contrib code we just follow upstream. In no case can anyone other 
than the copyright owner clarify, or otherwise change, a license.

Pedro.