Dear Tom Rini,
In message 1383164489-29450-1-git-send-email-trini@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@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.
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" ?
We need to know exactly the lines of code this applies to; otherwise I think the only safe way to solve this issue is by licensing the whole file as GPL-2.0.
For the future, we should be much more careful that no such mess creeps in; the scope of licence terms should be at no smaller units than file level.
Best regards,
Wolfgang Denk