Fendt, Oliver <[email protected]>:
> Thanks for sharing this.
> I'am wondering who should use the tool?
Project maintainers are an obvious audience. For example, I am the
maintainer of cvs-fast-export, a project with GPL headers in it placed
there by Keith Packard, who originated much of the core code. I
verified the function of spdxify by running it on the cvs-fast-export
tree and observing the results.
Your beliefs about IP law are excessively rigid; this is a common
form of superstition among hackers. In reality, the move from a GPL
header to an SPDX tag is legally innocuous because it has what a
court would call "no inequitable consequences" - that is, nobody's
interests are measurably damaged by it.
As David Wheeler pointed out, the SPDXifying change only moves
where the notice lives, it doesn't destroy information or change
anyone's bundle of rights or responsibilities. The fact that the
GPL can be read as prohibiting this is not even interesting, because
legal language is not self-enforcing magic juju.
Changing license notices - or for that matter changing *licenses* - is
actionable only if it would inflict actual harm on some rights-holder;
otherwise a judge would laugh you out of court. There is case law[1]
on this in the U.S.; it establishes that changing a license from
open-source to proprietary is actual harm, but so far the courts have not
ruled on whether changes between different open-source licenses can
cause actionable harm.
[1] Jacobsen vs. Katzer
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacobsen_v._Katzer
I am not a lawyer, but I am a subject-matter expert who has consulted with
lawyers. I will now express an opinion: It is *highly unlikely* that
a court will ever find any change of open-source license actionable, with
one possible exception: changes between reciprocal (GPL-style) and
non-reciprocal licenses. But from a court's point of view the difference
between (say) BSD and Apache would be very much de minimis non curat lex.
--
<a href="http://www.catb.org/~esr/";>Eric S. Raymond</a>
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