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
FSFE e.V. - keeping the power of technology in your hands. Your
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