Steve, Max:
FWIW, I already voiced my objection on this topic in the past and I
think this is going to be a source of confusion and ambiguity.

Why would we need to change the SPDX text for the purpose of one tool
and convention?

Max: Could you not change your text in your tool instead?

- I do not think any of the license texts in SPDX have been designed
to be used as reference texts; if anything the templating makes them
non suitable for this purpose.
- If mixing related texts together is the new way to craft a license
text, why not also change the texts of the LGPL 2 and 2.1 to include
the text of the GPL 2 in them?
- Like the LGPL, every other exception of the GPL would technically
demand to include a GPL text too... Does this mean that all the
exception texts should be updated now?


On Thu, Mar 10, 2022 at 4:06 PM Steve Winslow <swinslow@...> wrote:

Hi Max, circling back on this thread and your question:

We briefly discussed this as a follow-up on the last legal team call, and agreed that there did not appear to be any significant objections to modifying the LGPL-3.0[-only/-or-later] templates as earlier described here. I'm planning to submit a PR to incorporate the GPL text as optional in the templates, so that it'll be included for the next license list release.

Best,
Steve

On Mon, Jan 24, 2022 at 11:02 AM Max Mehl <max.mehl@...> wrote:

~ Steve Winslow [2022-01-10 22:33 +0100]:

*Proposal*:

REUSE would like to see the combined LGPL-3.0 + GPL-3.0 text used as the
plain text file for LGPL-3.0 on the License List. That way, anyone pulling
from the plain text licenses will (correctly) include both the LGPL and GPL
texts.

To implement this, the XML template for LGPL-3.0 would also be updated, to
add the GPL-3.0 text with <optional> tags following the non-optional
LGPL-3.0 text.

Personally, I'm +1 to make these changes:
* It solves the problem REUSE has identified for their use case
* It means that the LGPL-3.0-* templates will continue to match standalone
files with only the LGPL text, as well as matching files that contain the
combined LGPL+GPL texts.
* It doesn't resolve all possible ambiguities about "did you mean
everything in this repo is LGPL, or that some things are LGPL and some are
GPL?" But neither does the current state of affairs. Using SPDX short-form
license IDs and/or standard license headers solves this. So I don't see
this as particularly significant to this specific proposal.

Please discuss.

Following up on Steve's proposal, I see many people agreeing on it, or
at least shrugging. There has been a proposal by Alexios that would
require a larger rework as I understand it, but it feels not like a
blocker to this concrete proposal, rather like a good idea to make
special cases like these easier to handle in the future.

Are there any more blockers?

Best,
Max

--
Cordially

Philippe