Re: call tomorrow, agenda
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Dennis Clark
Hi Legal Team, The topic that Mark Gisi brought up in the extra time we had in our meeting this morning, the use of "AND" in a license expression, made we wish we had more time to pursue it, and I hope that we make it a priority topic for our next legal group meeting. Although my initial reaction to the issue was that we already cover it quite well, the subsequent discussion made it very clear that we have a problem. "AND" should have a reasonably precise definition: 1. AND means that two or more licenses apply to a software object. A typical case is a file with various bits of code from multiple open source origins, where all of them still apply. Another one is an executable that links together code under different licenses. An implication, although not guaranteed, of the use of AND is that the licenses are compatible. 2. AND is sometimes, arguably incorrectly, used to identify an assortment of licenses that can be found in various subcomponents of a package, often referring to software objects that are deployed independently in actual practice. Using AND in this case is misleading, as Mark pointed out, since a package can contain components under different licenses that are actually not compatible, although not really a problem depending on how they are ultimately deployed. We need to upgrade our license expression syntax to address this, and should do it soon, because the current version does not encourage accuracy, and there could be upgrade issues in the future if we decide to correct the situation. Mark mentioned the possibility of using a comma (as currently done by Debian and others) or a semicolon. I'm fine with using a comma, although I am inclined to think that something more explanatory would be better: how about a "CONTAINS" license expression keyword? Example: CONTAINS (GPL-2.0, LGPL-2.1, GFDL-1.2). Whatever the solution, we really need to define a way to express the second case described above. Thanks to everyone for an interesting meeting! Dennis Clark nexB Inc. On Wed, May 13, 2015 at 7:38 AM, <opensource@...> wrote: Hi all, |
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