[U-Boot] [PATCH] nand_util.c: Correct licensing

[Scott Wood]

On Wed, 2013-10-30 at 21:36 +0100, Wolfgang Denk wrote:
> Dear Tom Rini,
> 
> In message <1383164489-29450-1-git-send-email-trini at ti.com> you wrote:
> > This file is GPL-2.0 with Freescale granting rights for GPL-2.0+.  This
> > part was dropped by accident in the SPDX updates.
> 
> Sorry, but this doesn't work.
> 
> > --- a/drivers/mtd/nand/nand_util.c
> > +++ b/drivers/mtd/nand/nand_util.c
> > @@ -14,7 +14,14 @@
> >   * Copyright (C) 2008 Nokia Corporation: drop_ffs() function by
> >   * Artem Bityutskiy <dedekind1 at gmail.com> from mtd-utils
> >   *
> > - * SPDX-License-Identifier:	GPL-2.0+
> > + * Copyright 2010 Freescale Semiconductor
> > + * The portions of this file whose copyright is held by Freescale and which
> > + * are not considered a derived work of GPL v2-only code may be distributed
> > + * and/or modified under the terms of the GNU General Public License as
> > + * published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the
> > + * License, or (at your option) any later version.
> > + *
> > + * SPDX-License-Identifier:	GPL-2.0
> 
> The idea of the Licnese IDs is that you just grep for these lines to
> produce proper information about the license status of the file.
> Here, the special clause would be totally missed.
> 
> I don't know of any (even halfway) established method to express such
> a situation where different licenses apply to certain parts of a file
> in terms of Lincese IDs.  The only clean way to solve this I can think
> of at this time is to define a new License ID (GPL-2.0-FSL+ ?) and
> move this explanation to a file in the Licenses/ directory.

Yeah, it doesn't mix well with the license IDs.  Feel free to remove it
(but not the copyright line itself, which also got accidentally removed)
if you think it's more hindrance than help, which with the SPDX scheme
and the lack of continued talk about v2-only purges, it probably is.

> But I still see a pretty serious problem with the fact that the text
> is completely unspecific - or do we have any clear understanding for
> which exact parts of the file the "copyright is held by Freescale and
> which are not considered a derived work of GPL v2-only code" ?

The main situation in which it would be useful is if v2-only code is
being purged (which was talked about around the time I added those), in
which case upon manual inspection of the history it could possibly avoid
needing to toss the entire file -- especially if other contributers
added themselves to the statement, and there were to end up being little
to nothing left of the original v2-only code.  I thought it would be
better if such consent were to be issued up front, to minimize the
people that need to be contacted later on who may no longer be
reachable.  I suppose these e-mails in the archives serve a similar
purpose.

In any case, I don't think a new tag would be appropriate (and putting
FSL in it would discourage other contributors from joining in, which is
the opposite of the point).  For most purposes, including any that don't
involve manual inspection, it's the license on the entire file that
matters, which is GPL-2.0.

-Scott