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 10:35 AM, Joerg Sonnenberger <joerg at bec.de> 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.
>

BSD 2.11 has an indirection notice:
 * Copyright (c) 1986 Regents of the University of California.
 * All rights reserved.  The Berkeley software License Agreement
 * specifies the terms and conditions for redistribution.
for example.

4.1 and 4.2 didn't have license notices added. 4.3 had something similar to
BSD 2.11's notices. NET/2 is where they were added inline, and is the first
place I can find additions to the license that talk about 'this software
was contributed by XXX under contract to YYYY' and variations of the BSD
license appear. 4.4 take this to a new level.

So this isn't the Berne Convention thing, but rather a conscious decision
at Berkeley to do something different, I think because they were starting
to get / include software that wasn't under the exact BSD license, but some
variant or something different that was compatible with it, so they needed
to mark each file. However, the SPDX accomplishes that task in a format
that properly separates out the copyright notice from the licensing notice.
So I see nothing fundamentally wrong with this approach, and requiring
copies of a license that buys us nothing just creates friction for external
contributors that make them less willing to contribute without buying us
any additional benefit.

Warner