Re: meeting minutes from today
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Steve Winslow
Hi all, echoing Phil's comments -- several people have indicated
interest in increasing the velocity of adding new licenses to the
license list. I'd encourage anyone who shares this goal to participate
in reviewing and commenting on requests and issues, and creating/reviewing the license XML files, in the license list 's
GitHub repo [1]. I wanted to share a few
other thoughts (speaking just for myself and from my own perspective!)
Apologies for the lengthy response below. For
those who aren't familiar with the process of adding a license to the
list, details are at [2]. High-level, there are two major steps: 1) Legal Team evaluation and consensus around whether a new request
should be added. The SPDX legal team community reviews the request and
evaluates whether it is appropriate for inclusion on the license list --
e.g., is it already on the license list (taking the SPDX matching
guidelines into account); does it meet the list inclusion principles
[3]; etc. 2) Creating an XML file representing the license text and a test text
file. Separately from the evaluation in #1, adding the license requires
creating a representation of the license text in XML format that
conforms to the list's schema definition, together with a test text file
that is used for validating the XML file. Currently,
for both of these steps, the process typically involves discussion of
each license during an SPDX legal team call. This has often meant, for
each submission, getting verbal consensus on both whether the license is
appropriate to include on the list, and whether the submitted XML file
is correctly formatted and templated. Since the
legal team call is biweekly, I think that the only way the process will
accelerate to add licenses more quickly will be if more decision-making
occurs in the GitHub issue discussions, outside the calls. E.g., if
participants are actively reviewing and weighing in on submissions
directly in the issue threads, and making recommendations + determining
consensus or lack thereof. Where there
isn't consensus among the regular reviewers about a thumbs-up or
thumbs-down, that probably signals that it deserves discussion on one of
the biweekly calls. But where there's general agreement, perhaps we
should more readily accept and iterate based on the issue discussions. Jilayne
has done a fantastic job of encouraging this participation for a long
time, and of nudging the rest of us to review and comment between calls
(thank you Jilayne for all your efforts in moving us all forward!) I guess I'm asking the rest of us who want to see licenses added faster to the list, myself included,
to each figure out how we can better participate in reviews of license
submissions and creation of XML files, and reach consensus (or identify
where it's lacking), out-of-band from the team calls. Just like with any
other volunteer-powered community, the license list will only be able to
grow in line with the effort and availability of those who care to
contribute and participate in it on an ongoing basis. If you've made it this far, thanks for your attention to my ramblings... Steve On Tue, Jun 4, 2019 at 9:41 AM Phil Odence <phil.odence@...> wrote:
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