Copyright cleanup project

Joseph D. Darcy joe.darcy at oracle.com
Mon Nov 9 23:37:04 UTC 2015


Hello,

Most source files in the OpenJDK forest start with a comment block 
listing the copyright holder, for example,

     Copyright (c) 2014, 2015, Oracle and/or its affiliates. All rights 
reserved.

followed by the license the copyright holder is providing for the file. 
The typical licenses for source files in OpenJDK are GPL v2, GPL v2 with 
the ClassPath exception, and BSD where BSD is primarily used on samples 
and demos.

Templates for those copyright notices can be found in the JDK 9 forest 
under $ROOT/make/templates

Various inconsistencies in these copyrights and licenses have been 
noticed. For example, sometimes the year range is formatted differently 
or there are extraneous extra lines in the license block. In some other 
cases, a properly formatted copyright and license is present, but an 
inappropriate license is used; for example, a test file has GPL with 
ClassPath exception where GPL is more appropriate.

To help correct and regularize the licenses and copyrights, Vassili 
Igouchkine has developed tooling to analyze these portions of the source 
files. Vassili will be sending out code reviews for changes addressing 
the sorts of problems outlined above. The changes will target JDK 9 and 
be sent to aliases appropriate for the code being modified. In 
particular, precise checks will be applied to files where Oracle is the 
copyright holder. In the future, Vassili plans to develop a programmatic 
check for the licenses and copyrights that can catch both syntactic 
problems and well as improper licensing. The check will be something 
developers can run on their changesets before pushing. (This is not the 
sort of check believed to be suitable for inclusion in jcheck.)

While many of the corrections will be straightforward to review, others 
will be be tricky given the complicated history of some parts of the 
code. Please assist Vassili in this cleanup effort by providing prompt 
reviews.

Thanks,

-Joe



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