Re: [PATCH] tcg/LICENSE: Remove no-longer-true statement that TCG is BSD-licensed

[Peter Maydell]

On Mon, 21 Oct 2019 at 17:46, Daniel P. Berrangé <address@hidden> wrote:
>
> On Mon, Oct 21, 2019 at 05:36:49PM +0100, Peter Maydell wrote:
> > On Mon, 21 Oct 2019 at 15:58, Peter Maydell <address@hidden> wrote:
> > > Since 2008 the tcg/LICENSE file has not changed: it claims that
> > > everything under tcg/ is BSD-licensed.
> > >
> > > This is not true and hasn't been true for years: in 2013 we
> > > accepted the tcg/aarch64 target code under a GPLv2-or-later
> > > license statement. We don't really consider the tcg
> > > subdirectory to be a distinct part of QEMU anyway.
> >
> > This commit message misses the other not-BSD bits of code in tcg/:
> > tcg/tci.c is GPL-2-or-later
> > tcg/tcg-gvec-desc.h, tcg/tcg-op-gvec.[ch], tcg-op-vec.c are LGPL2.1-or-later
> >
> > Horse has clearly bolted further from the stable than
> > I had first thought.
>
> No matter what text we put in the top LICENSE file is always going to be
> rather vague because of the many different licenses scattered across the
> codebase.

There's two parts to this:
 (1) is what we say in LICENSE what we actually have in practice?
 (answer: clearly "no")
 (2) as a policy, do we want to be stricter about the license
 for code contributed to tcg/ than to the rest of the codebase?
 (which is what this patch is trying to flush out answers to)

> We really ought to make an effort to add SPDX tags to every file in the
> source tree & have checkpatch.pl enforce that all new files come with
> SPDX tags too. Identifying licenses for code then becomes a trivial grep.

My take on SPDX is still the same as it was last year:
https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/qemu-devel/2018-11/msg04151.html

thanks
-- PMM