1. posterid:1160316
  2. GPL-CC and Kernel enforcement statement

Re: GPL-CC and Kernel enforcement statement

J Lovejoy
 

Hi Philippe,

I’m not going to re-hash what was a very lengthy and (surprisingly to me) heated discussion on the Linux kernel enforcement statement, since that is all in the email list archives.

But as to your examples of [3], [4], and [5] below - they are all adopting the GPL Cooperation Commitment for projects, which is exactly the purpose that was drafted for. You will see the email I just sent explaining the thinking behind adding the GPL Cooperation Commitment for projects to the SPDX License List. I think these examples reinforce that thinking.

Thanks,
Jilayne

On Mar 15, 2019, at 5:10 AM, Philippe Ombredanne <pombredanne@...> wrote:

Dear legal eagles:
I just saw that the request to have a proper SPDX license id for the
Kernel enforcement statement has been closed [1]. I guess I should
have followed the discussion that happened late last year since I
started this on list way back when [2]...

I am looking at all the non-SPDX licenses detected in the kernel to
submit them for addition and I am not clear why this would be
rejected: this text is detected alright when you scan the kernel and
has been for a long while (at least by ScanCode). And the same applies
to the GPL-CC [3]. IMHO as a license compliance toolsmith, if this is
something licensing-related, then it should be detected. It it is
detected and is in common enough, then it should have a name/id.

1. Do such statements/commitments texts are worthy of detection by a
license scanner? I think so. Otherwise, why would they exist?

2. Are they common enough? Beyond the kernel, there is a growing
number of projects and companies adopting these [4] [5] and is even
suggested by GitHub's choosealicence [6], so I would say yes.

What is wrong with this reasoning? Could someone explain to me in
simple terms why not including these in the list?
Thank you ++ for your help!

[1] https://github.com/spdx/license-list-XML/issues/655
[2] https://lists.spdx.org/g/Spdx-legal/message/2083
[3] https://github.com/spdx/license-list-XML/issues/714
[4] https://github.com/PHPMailer/PHPMailer#license
[5] https://github.com/jboss-set/eap-additional-testsuite/blob/99571420357fe1353f3f2bc994986f03f5661751/Runtimes/ACTIVEMQ/README.md#license
[6] https://github.com/github/choosealicense.com/blob/gh-pages/_includes/sidebar.html#L29
--
Cordially
Philippe Ombredanne
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