Message-ID: <jpajowiaidwzpcfcfuwqnxvzmr7wlebmc5u6mo3s62vv5td26p@roz224sqq327>
Date: Fri, 27 Jun 2025 15:09:17 +0200
From: Alejandro Colomar <alx@...nel.org>
To: Vincent Lefevre <vincent@...c17.net>, 
	Jilayne Lovejoy <opensource@...ayne.com>, seabass-labrax@....com, Carlos O'Donell <carlos@...hat.com>, 
	"Andries E. Brouwer" <aeb@....nl>, linux-man@...r.kernel.org, linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org, 
	libc-alpha@...rceware.org
Subject: Re: man-pages-6.14 released

Hi Vincent,

On Fri, Jun 27, 2025 at 09:49:25AM +0200, Vincent Lefevre wrote:
> On 2025-06-27 06:23:26 +0200, Alejandro Colomar wrote:
> > > I've always heard that a copyright notice was optional and only
> > > informative (so, in particular, there are no requirements to have
> > > per-file copyright notices instead of a single one for the work).
> > 
> > I tend to agree with you.  I'll invoke some SPDX people, which might
> > clarify our legal doubts.  I suspect they're lawyers or have contact
> > with lawyers.
> > 
> > For context to the SPDX people, we're discussing if the following is
> > valid or not:
> > 
> > There were a lot of old copyright notices, each with its own format,
> > some more formal, some less...
> > 
> > That was a huge mess, and the copyright notices were not always
> > respected: for example, in cases code has been moved from one file to
> > another, and the copyright notices weren't carried over.  In other
> > cases, some people (including myself) significantly modified some files,
> > but forgot to add a copyright notice for themselves.
> > 
> > So, I eventually decided to unify the copyright notices for the entire
> > project, so that the copyright notices would look like
> > 
> > 	Copyright, the authors of the Linux man-pages project
> > 
> > And then a top-level AUTHORS file would list every author.  This is
> > quite more accurate than the previous copyright notices.  However, some
> > contributors are concerned that it might be illegal to modify those
> > copyright notices without express written permission.
> > 
> > I've sent email to everyone whose copyright notice has been modified,
> > and I got around a third of explicit approvals, but the other two thirds
> > remained silent (in some cases, the emails probably don't exist, the
> > people are dead, or they don't read the email anymore).  Notably, nobody
> > has explicitly said no.
> > 
> > What do you think?
> 
> There is actually a more important issue: it appears that the man
> pages are not all distributed under the same license (according to
> "SPDX-License-Identifier:"), so that some care would have had do be
> done when copying text from one man page to another one. That said,
> I would tend to think that when such text has been copied, this was
> for related man pages, and there is a chance that such man pages are
> distributed under the same license.

Yeah, most likely it happened like that.  I recall having been a bit
careful about that, and don't remember moving text from significantly
differently licensed files.

> Unifying the licenses by asking
> the authors / copyright holders would be a great thing to do.

I did actually ask a few contributors, for cases where a license was
used only in a few pages, to change their license.  I got rid that way
of a couple of unique licenses.  That was some years ago, when I worked
in having SPDX license identifiers for the man-pages licenses.

In fact, some distros had complained that some of the existing licenses
were considered non-free, and we got explicit approval from all
copyright holders to change the license.

> Now, about the copyright notices, you also need to give the full
> list of the licenses that can apply, as some license may require
> the copyright notice to have some restricted form (such as being
> included in the file itself).
> 
> For instance, the GPL licenses have
> 
>   To do so, attach the following notices to the program. It is safest
>   to attach them to the start of each source file to most effectively
>   convey the exclusion of warranty; and each file should have at least
>   the "copyright" line and a pointer to where the full notice is
>   found.
> 
> (or "state" instead of "convey"), for which this seems clear that
> the current decision is OK.
> 
> I think that among the licences listes under LICENSES, only
> Linux-man-pages-1-para could be problematic, but only 18 files
> are concerned.

Have a lovely day!
Alex

-- 
<https://www.alejandro-colomar.es/>

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