linux-kernel - Re: how much license information inside the kernel ?

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Date:	Thu, 30 Oct 2008 20:02:48 +0100
From:	devzero@....de
To:	Chris Snook <csnook@...hat.com>
Cc:	linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org
Subject: Re: how much license information inside the kernel ?

> devzero@....de wrote:
> > hi,
> > 
> > i found that there is a LOT of repeating licensing information in the
> > kernel.
> > 
> > for me,
> > 
> > find ./linux-2.6.27 -type f -exec cat {} \; |egrep "free software|GNU
> > General Public License|Free Software Foundation|version 2 of the
> > License|distributed in the hope|WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY|FITNESS FOR A
> > PARTICULAR"
> > 
> > gives a file sized ~3.5M
> > 
> > That`s more than 1% of the kernel source.
> > 
> > What about the idea to shorten that licening information to a minimum
> > , e.g. by shrinking that to a single, catchy line ,  linking to a
> > special licensing file like COPYING or linking to the FSF website ?
> > 
> > please no flames, i know this idea could be pure dynamite for some
> > people - but i thought 3.5M is worth this mail.
> > 
> > regards roland
> > 
> > ps: i`m not sure if that has been discussed already, but i didn`t
> > find that in the archive. please ignore, otherwise.
> 
> It may be 3.5 MB uncompressed, but disk space is cheap, and repeated 
> strings compress extremely well to save bandwidth.  If you work with the 
> kernel source enough for this to be an issue, you should use git. 
> You'll download these license headers once, and never again unless the 
> copyright info gets changed by a patch.  From a technical perspective, 
> the problem isn't nearly as bad as it looks, and it keeps the lawyers 
> happy, so it's really not worth messing with.  There's plenty of 
> lower-hanging fruit in unifying drivers for similar hardware, unifying 
> 32-bit and 64-bit architectures, and other things that make the code 
> more maintainable.
> 
> -- Chris
> 

yes, convinced - itŽs not worth the work to clean that up.
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