[U-Boot] SPDX License status

[Tom Rini]

On Mon, Aug 21, 2017 at 05:25:40PM +0200, Wolfgang Denk wrote:
> Dear Tom,
> 
> In message <20170819011542.GE17193 at bill-the-cat> you wrote:
> > 
> > For all of the dts/dtsi files that we copy in-place from Linux,
> > converting them to SPDX tags would be churn that has to be kept in-place
> > every update, and upstream does not want them (I had a chat with Frank
> > or Rob at some point, I think).
> 
> Do I interpret this correctly that you think we should NOT insert
> SPDX tags into files imported from Linux (or other projects)?  But
> how do we keep track of the origin of such files, then?  Git meta
> data information is not useful for automatic tracking tools (or are
> there such clever tools available by now?)...

Generally speaking, Linux Kernel is what we're pulling stuff from, and
that's the project that doesn't care for SPDX tags being introduced, and
we know what we sync largely there.  For other projects, some evangelism
about SPDX might work.

> > So, when I've run U-Boot through the "old" SPDX-2.0 tools, it was quite
> > happy to diagnose the information on dts files from the kernel
> > correctly, so I don't see changing them to tags as being beneficial.  I
> 
> I tend to disagree here.  THe process of inserting License tags
> makes automatic scanning easier, and it documents that somebody
> looked at this.

For the former, the SPDX tools handle the standard boilerplates fine,
and they have to, since most projects aren't using tags.  For the
latter, given our automated conversion, that's not really true.  And at
the end of the day, the lawyers need to look it over at the end.

> > I would be quite happy to see more patches along the lines of
> > 78e9e71c83cf which correct the missing information in files by pulling
> > in specific changes from their respective upstream (or at least a
> > specific release that contains the change) that corrects this
> > information.  I also suspect this will leave us with a few files that in
> > the kernel today have loose wording and we have to either live with it,
> > or talk to upstream about updating it.
> 
> So what do we do for example with all the .dts / .dtsi files?  Would
> you accept patches to insert SPDX tags for U-Boot?  [I see no chance
> to do this in Linux mainline.]

We leave the dts/dtsi files un-touched from upstream, yes.  Thanks!

-- 
Tom
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