Hi all,

From our last call, the subject of 'when can people start using short ids? ‘ came up. This has been asked before on individual license submissions and we have answered informally, but it might be helpful to have a more official stance and document it somewhere.

The options I can see are and my thoughts on each:

1) Once the new license and id appear on the SPDX License List after the next release
JL: this can require a long wait, as our release cycle is quarterly. Personally, I think this is too long for many people who are motivated to start using the short id (which is often why they have submitted a license to SPDX to begin with)

2) Once the PR for the new license has been merged
JL: This makes a lot of sense, as once a PR has been merged, it’s HIGHLY unlikely that something would change after that; it’s ostensibly waiting in the queue to become part of the official next release. Downside, is that creating the files can take some time; on the other hand, if the submitter is really in a hurry, they have the ability to create the files themselves, and then it’s just a matter of an SPDX-legal person merging it.

3) Once the license submission has been noted as accepted in the Issue and all the fields have been sorted using our new decision template
JL: This would be the earliest point in time, which might be nice for the submitter, although it sort of frustrates any motivation for the submitter to help with creating the PR. It would also mean more care taken before marking a license as accepted, especially as relates to choosing a short id (not necessarily a bad thing). We have occasionally realized things after the Issue is marked as accepted, in the making of the files for the PR, so this is the risk here.


Cheers,
Jilayne