Attached is the draft of the SPDX Legal Working group’s License Expression Syntax for the upcoming SPDX 2.0 Specification. We are seeking community feedback by September 12th.

Overview:

Often a single license can be used to represent the licensing terms of a source code or binary file, but there are situations where a single license identifier is not sufficient. A common example is when software is offered under a choice of one or more licenses (e.g., GPL-2.0 OR BSD-3-Clause). Another example is when a set of licenses is needed to represent a binary program constructed by compiling and linking two (or potential more) different source files each governed by different licenses (e.g., LGPL-2.1 and BSD-3-Clause respectively). In this section of the SPDX 2.0 specification we define the <SPDX-License-Expression> construct, a licensing expression string that enables one to more accurately represent the licensing terms of modern day software.

Examples:

Here are some examples of real world source code license notices that highlight the need for a license expression syntax:

   http://wiki.spdx.org/view/FileNoticeExamples

A summary of the SPDX Legal Working group’s decision to add a License Expression Language to the SPDX 2.0 specification can be found here:

   http://wiki.spdx.org/view/Legal_Team/Decisions/license_expression_syntax

We look forward to your feedback.

Regards,

Mark

Mark Gisi | Wind River | Senior Intellectual Property Manager

Tel (510) 749-2016 | Fax (510) 749-4552