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Re: update on only/or later etc.

Gary O'Neall
 

I think this is a good overall solution.

It solves the issue raised by the FSF and is reasonably compatible. On the last legal call, I raised a concern that it didn't handle the case where the version may be ambiguous. After the call, I realized that we have this issue today and we don't really need to solve this in this release of the license list. Probably better to solve one issue at a time, and I have no problem starting with the issue raised by Richard and the FSF.

Thanks Jilayne for moving this forward.

Additional thoughts on the '+' operator below:

-----Original Message-----
From: spdx-legal-bounces@... [mailto:spdx-legal-
bounces@...] On Behalf Of W. Trevor King
Sent: Thursday, November 16, 2017 4:53 PM
To: J Lovejoy
Cc: SPDX-legal
Subject: Re: update on only/or later etc.

Keep the + modifier in the license expression language
- this allows use of + with other licenses as always, no change, no
backwards compatibility
I am strongly against having both a ‘GPL-2.0+’ license ID and a ‘+’
operator. I think committing to a ‘GPL-2.0+’ license ID is an unfortunate but
tenable postition. And if we go that way, I'd rather remove the ‘+’ operator
entirely.

I'd be ok with ‘GPL-2.0-or-later’ while preserving the ‘+’ operator for other
licenses. But if a ‘+’ operator is deemed not good enough for the GPL, which
licenses would it be good enough for? This feels like “we don't know when
we'd recommend ‘+’, but didn't have the heart to kill it”.
I agree with Trevor that we should not have both the + modifier and the GPL-2.0+ as a license ID as it makes the parsing ambiguous.

My preference would be GPL-2.0-or-later and preserving the '+' operator. The '+' operator could be useful for licenses where they do not explicitly handle the 'or later' versions in the license text and it maintains better compatibility.

Cheers,
Gary
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