Many source files in the tree are missing licensing information, which
makes it harder for compliance tools to determine the correct license.
By default all files without license information are under the default
license of the kernel, which is GPL version 2.
Update the files which contain no license information with the 'GPL-2.0'
SPDX license identifier. The SPDX identifier is a legally binding
shorthand, which can be used instead of the full boiler plate text.
This patch is based on work done by Thomas Gleixner and Kate Stewart and
Philippe Ombredanne.
How this work was done:
Patches were generated and checked against linux-4.14-rc6 for a subset of
the use cases:
- file had no licensing information it it.
- file was a */uapi/* one with no licensing information in it,
- file was a */uapi/* one with existing licensing information,
Further patches will be generated in subsequent months to fix up cases
where non-standard license headers were used, and references to license
had to be inferred by heuristics based on keywords.
The analysis to determine which SPDX License Identifier to be applied to
a file was done in a spreadsheet of side by side results from of the
output of two independent scanners (ScanCode & Windriver) producing SPDX
tag:value files created by Philippe Ombredanne. Philippe prepared the
base worksheet, and did an initial spot review of a few 1000 files.
The 4.13 kernel was the starting point of the analysis with 60,537 files
assessed. Kate Stewart did a file by file comparison of the scanner
results in the spreadsheet to determine which SPDX license identifier(s)
to be applied to the file. She confirmed any determination that was not
immediately clear with lawyers working with the Linux Foundation.
Criteria used to select files for SPDX license identifier tagging was:
- Files considered eligible had to be source code files.
- Make and config files were included as candidates if they contained >5
lines of source
- File already had some variant of a license header in it (even if
Reviewed-by: Philippe Ombredanne
Reviewed-by: Thomas Gleixner
Signed-off-by: Greg Kroah-Hartman
