Greetings SPDX tech and legal teams,

A reminder we are continuing the license namespace discussions tomorrow, Friday, 10 June 2022, at the same time (15:00 UTC, 8AM Pacific).

We will be using the Legal Team’s JITSI meeting coordinates:

https://meet.jit.si/SPDXLegalMeeting

Dial-in: +1.512.647.1431 PIN: 3275 0470 68#

We will focus this meeting on the namespace proposals continuing the discussions where we left off last week.

The minutes including the agenda can be found here: https://github.com/spdx/meetings/blob/main/joint/2022-06-03.md

I would like to limit the problem statement discussion to 20 minutes, 30 at most.

To make this discussion more efficient and productive, I would like to stick with the list and actions we discussed last week and not introduce any new problem statements.

Here’s a summary of the problem statement lists and actions we agreed to – along with a few additional suggestions some of you have made:

TL;DR – we’re going to focus on #5 below.

1. Unable to reference or locate LicenseRef text where the reference is in one SPDX document and the text is outside that document.
• Agreed existing spec features cover this, but needs better documentation.  Agreed to update Annex D.  No need to discuss as a problem statement – we’ll need a plan to document which we will discuss later in the agenda
2. Unable to reference or locate LicenseRef text where the reference is in one SPDX document and the text is outside that document.
• Consensus that this is better addressed by REUSE.  No need to further discuss as a problem statement.
3. Unable to reference or locate LicenseRef text where the reference is in one SPDX document and the text is outside that document.
• No consensus on this topic
• Action was to identify at least one package manager group who would agree to implement namespaces before including this in the problem statements.  If we do not find at least one such package manager group by our meeting tomorrow, we will consider this problem out of scope for this specific namespace solution
• At the start of the meeting – we will check to see if anyone found such a package manager group.
4. Ability to efficiently reference common licenses which are not on the SPDX License List, including those which do not meet the SPDX license inclusion principles Reworded: Should we have a way to efficiently reference common licenses which are not on the SPDX License List, regardless of context (e.g. not specific to source code / Documents / package managers)
• The votes for this were 9 in favor, 3 not in favor.  We’ll discuss on the call, but it looks pretty likely this will be in scope for the namespace problems to solve (I’m hoping this is a very short discussion)
5. Ability to advertise the availability of license lists other than the SPDX license list
• There was an almost even split on this problem statement, so further discussion is warranted
• It was pointed out during and after the meeting, that this is a bit confusing as to what we mean by “advertise”.  To help clarify, I would like to split this into 2 different problem statements:
• Ability to promote license lists other than the SPDX license list in a similar fashion to how we promote tools that support the SPDX standard
• Ability to locate/find license lists other than the SPDX license list
6. Should namespace proposal help solve the issue of capturing variants of licenses which match the same listed licenses per the matching guidelines?
• There were 2 votes for this, 6 votes against
• I followed up with both votes for and they are OK not including this in the namespace discussion
• Even if we don’t solve this in the namespace proposal, it still needs to be discussed – suggest discussing it in a separate meeting – perhaps one of the legal or tech team calls

Following the problem statements discussion, we can decide on what actions need to be taken followed by the policy discussion followed by the syntax and process discussion per the original agenda.

See you online tomorrow.

Best regards,

Gary