Messages in this thread | | | Date | Thu, 16 Nov 2017 12:46:39 +0100 | From | Jonas Oberg <> | Subject | Re: [patch 2/7] LICENSES: Add the GPL 2.0 license |
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Hi Thomas,
I do appreciate your work on this, it's a welcome addition!
> +SPDX-License-Identifier: GPL-2.0 // GPLv2 only > +SPDX-License-Identifier: GPL-2.0+ // GPLv2 or later
I am concerned about this though, as the SPDX-License-Identifier is well known to refer to the license of the document in which it appears, and it would be beneficial to avoid a situation where a tool reading this make the assumption the license text itself it under a particular license. Essentially, let's avoid overloading if we can.
From my reading, there are two intentions with the above reading:
1) To give usage guidelines and signal that for any source file, adding this exact line would be a valid license identifier, and 2) To make the license identifiers computer understandable such that tools can be updated to validate whether source code includes a license identifier which corresponds to one of the licenses in LICENSES/
I'd propose to not try to do both at the same time and would propose a 'Valid-License-Identifier' tag to meet your second criteria, and a 'Usage-Guidance' tag to meet your first one. The header would then be:
Valid-License-Identifier: GPL-2.0 Valid-License-Identifier: GPL-2.0+ Usage-Guidance: To use this license in source code, you can use either of the following tags and values: . SPDX-License-Identifier: GPL-2.0 // For GPLv2 only SPDX-License-Identifier: GPL-2.0+ // For GPLv2 or any later version
Best,
-- Jonas Öberg Executive Director
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