public domain dedications proliferation
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J Lovejoy
Hi SPDX-legal,
I have raised this a couple times in the past few months or so, but now that it is more of a "ripe" topic, I wanted to get some input on preliminary ideas: Background: Fedora has now officially adopted the use of SPDX ids in packages meta data (specifically, the license field of the package spec file). Due to Fedora historically using "category" short names for groups of similar licenses, we suspect there may be a number of additions to the SPDX License List needed. Public domain category: Specifically, Fedora has used "public domain" for any public domain dedication, without capturing the exact text. For Fedora package maintainers who are keen to update the license info for their packages, we have given this interim advice: https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/legal/license-field/#_public_domain and https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/legal/update-existing-packages/#_callaway_short_name_categories (see section on "public domain") SPDX approach: The SPDX License List has always operated from the principle that an SPDX license id represents a specific, identifiable license/set of text. This is critical as part of our project goal of being both human and machine-readable. However, if it turns out that there are a large number of slight variations of text that mean the same thing (e.g., a simply one line statement of public domain dedication), then perhaps SPDX might consider a slightly different approach? But, in order to even consider this, we'd need data. Idea for going forward: As Fedora package maintainers find these texts that had been marked generically as "public domain" - what if we asked them to copy the actual text of what they found and maybe a link to where they found it (or some other such pointer) in a simply formatted file in the Fedora license-list-data repo? See https://gitlab.com/fedora/legal/fedora-license-data/-/merge_requests/54 This would be at least a beginning of collecting this data that SPDX-legal could then review in a more bulk fashion in order to consider the above potential approach. If so, what other info besides the text itself should be collected and how can it be most easily formatted to enable easy consumption later? For example, it could be something like this: === package = Foo text = This is released into the public domain. source = <url to file or other such pointer> === I wouldn't want to be more than a few pieces of information. There is also always the ability to search on the short name "public domain" or the interiem SPDX id of "LicenseRef-Fedora-Public-Domain", but might as well start collecting info if package maintainers are looking as well. Thoughts? (need input ASAP :) thanks, Jilayne |
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