committers-guide: Switch license to SPDX only

[ziaee]

Summary

Matching what we do on the licensing guide [0].
Should we also switch the link from the internal/licensing-policy [1]
to the licensing policy in the docs tree [0]? What's going on here?

[0]: https://docs.freebsd.org/en/articles/license-guide/
[1]: https://www.freebsd.org/internal/software-license/

[lwhsu]

I personally think this is a good direction and also what currently in style(9). We have so many copy-n-paste license in the tree, with more or less issues.

[ziaee]

Ping

[ziaee]

Ping, all other doc has been updated, but I feel like I can't commit this without some approval because core was tagged.

[lwhsu]

I think in general it's good. There are 2 stuff I'd like to check:

• The order of SPDX and Copyright, it's different in license-guide (same as style(9)) and software-license
• In 82a06c65d256094bc5c36f068eff3cf1b136e5ba we also removed [id for your version control system, if any] part. I guess we can also follow this.

My personal thought is that after making those consistent, it might be a good idea to keep one source of truth and just provide a link in other places.

[imp]

In D54444#1295488, @lwhsu wrote:

I think in general it's good. There are 2 stuff I'd like to check:

• The order of SPDX and Copyright, it's different in license-guide (same as style(9)) and software-license
• In 82a06c65d256094bc5c36f068eff3cf1b136e5ba we also removed [id for your version control system, if any] part. I guess we can also follow this.

My personal thought is that after making those consistent, it might be a good idea to keep one source of truth and just provide a link in other places.

There's a number of places that need to be updated, and I'm working on an update to catch all the places that talk about this.

This commit, though, is fine and won't get in my way.

[emaste]

documentation/content/en/articles/committers-guide/_index.adoc

2820–2821

As @lwhsu mentions this should also be removed (perhaps as a separate commit)

[mhorne]

I know the "Copyright before SPDX" issue was discussed and decided (maybe ad nauseam). I admit I still have little understanding of why, but I note that much more will need to be done to make it known. New code being committed to the src tree still has the SPDX first, as this is the nearly universal precedent.
So, just saying, you who are interested will need to advertise this decision more widely.

Between these three sources, IMO the "License Guide" is/ought-to-be the source of truth. In both other cases, I would suggest removing the text outright, and just having a short paragraph and a link.

But yes, this LGTM in the meantime.

[imp]

In D54444#1296501, @mhorne wrote:

I know the "Copyright before SPDX" issue was discussed and decided (maybe ad nauseam). I admit I still have little understanding of why, but I note that much more will need to be done to make it known. New code being committed to the src tree still has the SPDX first, as this is the nearly universal precedent.
So, just saying, you who are interested will need to advertise this decision more widely.

Yes. The policy was set years ago, but badly communicated, it turns out, and the sweep through the docs never happened.

SPDX first is not universal precedent. New code is a mix. The problem is we can't be consistent: the rest of open source is 70/30 for Copyright First (especially if you exclude those files from Linux that had the GPL line blasted in by script at the first line), the old recommendation from SDPX was copyright first (now they have no recommendation but their examples are copyright first). The SPDX first for boilerplate skews numbers as well. The 70/30 numbers were from a larger open source survey before we did the policy originally. Depending on what subset of the open source world you lurk in, you get different impressions about what the precedent it. It was tricky when we picked and it's tricky now to get good numbers. :(

So it's preferred copyright first, but it won't be required. It's strongly preferred to have SPDX only. I'll make that distinction as well. I'll include you on reviews.

Between these three sources, IMO the "License Guide" is/ought-to-be the source of truth. In both other cases, I would suggest removing the text outright, and just having a short paragraph and a link.

There's three other places that I think I've found.