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

[Warner Losh]

On Sun, Mar 25, 2018 at 10:46 AM, Rodney W. Grimes <
freebsd at pdx.rh.cn85.dnsmgr.net> wrote:

> > On Sun, Mar 25, 2018 at 09:03:20AM -0700, Rodney W. Grimes wrote:
> > > Kirk would have to back me up on this, but my understanding of the
> > > decisions that the UCB Regents legal staff came to was that each
> > > file should have a complete copyright and license clause and any
> > > thing less causes problems because of "seprability", and "alterability"
> > > because of seperate files.
> >
> > Are you talking about a decision made before the USA joined the rest of
> > the civilised world as signee of the Berne Convention?
> > The copyright
> > notice was certainly required at the time. A full license clause is
> > nicer for "stealing" things, but certainly not required.
>
> With or without application of Berne Convention, without a license
> you (us, FreeBSD project, foundation) have no rights to publish
> (redistribute) the work, unless that copyright is a of the form
> that it would "placed in the public domain" the work.
>

True. However, not relevant: we have a license here. The code tells us what
it is. This is no different than commercial code that says something like
"Copyright Sun, use governed by source license agreement" or  Copyright
Digital... Reference "/usr/src/COPYRIGHT" for applicable restrictions." or
similar things that have been done.

There's absolutely zero problem with indirection to a neutral third party
that retains a copy of the license either.

I reviewed the code before Mark committed it. The copyright notice and
license SPDX entries were totally legit and completely sufficient. While
other entries in the tree have both, so the SPDX is not controlling, in
this case there's just the pointer and that's legally defensible. Until we
get a qualified legal opinion to the contrary, we should just drop it.

Warner