Gisi, Mark [mailto:Mark.Gisi@...]:

My main concern is: if we don't choose a sufficiently expressive syntax, and end up losing information, then we will have done more damage to SPDX than good. It needs to represent NOTICES and not just a single license.

Fair enough.

I very much like the idea of permitting a license *expression*, instead of one license. Fedora and Debian already do this, so this is a well-understood area. But that's not too difficult, just permit expressions with parentheses, "AND", and "OR". In many cases this would still be simple; here's an example of what I have in mind:

SPDX-License-Notice: This file is licensed under the following terms:
SPDX-License-Identifier: LGPL-2.1 OR MPL-1.1
SPDX-License-More-Information: http://wiki.spdx.org/licenselist/spdx-1.1

In general, we all want both simplicity (so people will USE it) and expressiveness (so it can be USEFUL). The trick is getting there...


--- David A. Wheeler