Thanks Till for reporting the issue and Steve for looking into it.

My first reaction would be that the two texts, ANTLR with additional license and ANTLR without, are legally different licenses (with different effects which are important for the reasons Till mentioned), and should therefore be added as a new version of the ANTLR license rather than added as optional matching text to the original.

What do others think?

Best,

Brad

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On Tue, Jun 23, 2020 at 8:36 AM Steve Winslow <swinslow@...> wrote:

Hi Till -- taking a closer look, it seems that the language you cited was added to the original ANTLR 2 license sometime later, which is probably why it isn't in the license list version.

Looking at the Wayback Machine, http://web.archive.org/web/20130401024631/https://www.antlr2.org/license.html shows that at least as of April 2013 the ANTLR 2 License did not include that additional paragraph. I haven't done a deeper dive yet to figure out when it was subsequently added.

Given that, I'd be inclined to add it to the ANTLR-PD markup but to mark it as optional, so that it would match whether or not that paragraph is present.

Thanks,

Steve

On Tue, Jun 23, 2020 at 8:33 AM Steve Winslow via lists.spdx.org <swinslow=linuxfoundation.org@...> wrote:

Thanks for flagging this, Till. I've added an issue in the license-list-XML repo to track this at https://github.com/spdx/license-list-XML/issues/1056.

I don't know the history of this one myself, but it looks like that language had been omitted prior to when the license list was first brought into source control (see https://github.com/spdx/license-list-XML/commits/master/src/ANTLR-PD.xml). I expect it should be added into the ANTLR-PD markup for the reasons you mentioned.

Best,

Steve

On Tue, Jun 23, 2020 at 5:33 AM Till Jaeger via lists.spdx.org <jaeger=jbb.de@...> wrote:

Hello list,

I just found out that there is a deviation from
https://spdx.org/licenses/ANTLR-PD.html#licenseText to the linked text from
http://www.antlr2.org/license.html which contains the following language:

"In countries where the Public Domain status of the work may not be valid,
the author grants a copyright licence to the general public to deal in the
work without restriction and permission to sublicence derivates under the
terms of any (OSI approved) Open Source licence."

From the perspective from EU law this is an extremely important part since
it makes clear that a unrestricted license is intended if PD does not work.
This avoids (always disputable) interpretation of the PD text.

Is there any reason for the omission? Could the text be added?

Best regards,

Till

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Steve Winslow
Director of Strategic Programs
The Linux Foundation

swinslow@...

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Steve Winslow
Director of Strategic Programs
The Linux Foundation

swinslow@...