Hi McCoy,

I’m wondering if you are trying to adapt SPDX identifiers in a situation not anticipated. Consider that aim of an SPDX document (as per the SPDX specification, and thus, using SPDX license ids in the various specification field, is to communicate licensing, copyright, provenance, etc. information for a given bundle of software. For example, I sell you Jilaynes-awesome-software-app and provide an SPDX document for that software product. The licensing info in this context would be presubaly what I think you are referring to as the “outbound” license - that is the license under which the software is used by the recipient.

Let’s say, Jilaynes-awesome-software-app includes some open source software under various open source licenses, say, MIT and Apache-2.0, and I also added some of my own (new) code under BSD-3-Clause, that all of this can be reflected in the appropriate license fields at the package, file, and/or snippet level.

I think of “inbound”, in relation to open source software, as usually referring to the license under which contributions are provided to the project. But I think you might be meaning “inbound” in relation to Jilayne’s-awesome-software-app - that is, the open source software that I incorporate into my app under MIT and Apache-2.0. Is that right?

Thanks,
Jilayne