On Sep 30, 2018, at 8:18 AM, Philippe Ombredanne <pombredanne@...> wrote:

Mike:
On Sat, Sep 29, 2018 at 9:45 PM Mike Linksvayer <ml@...> wrote:

I did not know license list candidates must have the general attributes of an "open source" license, but I'm glad to learn of the requirement.
I wonder how the CC NC and ND licenses made it through (I searched the list archives a bit and didn't come up with anything, probably due to my own lack of search savvy or persistence), and whether those identifiers should be deprecated?
Mostly this is idle curiosity on my part, please ignore if annoying. I can live with incongruity. :)

If I recall correctly: when we started we did add wholesale all the CC
licenses without much discrimination.
That's an incongruity that I can live with alright.

Philippe is correct. We didn’t have written guidelines (aka, the “inclusion principles) for the first few iterations of the license list. If memory serves, all the CC licenses were recommended to be added and so we did. Remember, the SPDX License List began around 2009-2010 - that’s a long time ago now ;)

Later we realized other people might want to suggest licenses (“other people” meaning - other than the original people who came up with the original list) and we ought to have some guidelines. This probably also may have been precipitated by the question of whether to add other clearly non-open source licenses to the list - while the SPDX spec can be used with any software license, it was decided (multiple times) SPDX License List was to remain for open source licenses and use the OSD as a guiding principle, but without strict adherence (that’s what the OSI is for). And so here we are.

Mike - if you really wanted to know the when of it all, I suppose I could try to figure that out, but I’m not sure it matters at this point (nor am I sure it’s worth my time, versus dealing with the log of issues in the current queue!) If there is some historical background to this end we could add somewhere - either on the overview page or some other place, do let me know if you think that would be helpful.

Cheers,
Jilayne