[coreboot] Long license headers (ANGER WARNING)

Alexandru Gagniuc mr.nuke.me at gmail.com
Tue Mar 3 07:06:22 CET 2015


There's this thing called a copyright notice, which is pretty cool. When 
coding on 24" monitors or larger, it's this tiny thing that keeps some legal 
history of a file. The world is perfect and there are no issues!

Then FSF comes and teaches us to be in-your-face with a 20+ line copyright 
notice, and laptops happen. And 14" screens become a long-forgotten glory. Now 
you have to *BLEEP*ing scroll down every time you open a file just to get to 
the real content. It becomes so annoying, that I will personally stop giving 
positive gerrit scores on any CL that introduces such a file.

Then we get to situations where we waste all that copyright notice space for 
one line of code [1]. This madness has to stop.

Tell me what the file does, add your (C) line, tell me how you license the 
file, and move on! Start coding already for *BLEEP*'s sake! Here:

/*
 * On copyright notices: Angry email to coreboot mailing list
 *
 * Copyright (C) Some really pissed off guy <angry at mad.com>
 * Licensed under WTFPL, or, at your option, Allah Akbar public license.
 */

There, you've achieved the same thing as that abomination of notice that we 
need to change whenever some third party moves its headquarters. Now I can 
open a file and see

/*
 * On the subject of flowers and sunny skies
 *
...

and I immediately know I'm in the wrong place. Be pragmatic! Be practical! 
Tell me what your file does. Talk about it. Document stuff. It's a much better 
use of space. I could probably kidnap any of you, torture you asking for your 
bank information, and you'd be much more likely to recite, without error, all 
versions of the GPL.

And once that's settled, we can start migrating all files to concise notices, 
while keeping the exact same information we had before.

TL;DR

1) Tell me about your file
2) Add your (C) line
3) Document the license of your choosing (in 1 line)
4) Move on to coding!

[1] http://review.coreboot.org/#/c/8488/10/src/cpu/amd/model_10xxx/ram_calc.h

Alex
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