Re: Today's Agenda Legal WorkStream


Jilayne Lovejoy <jilayne.lovejoy@...>
 

I believe we already discussed this to some degree and decided that we would not enter the arena of word equivalents with the exception of spelling variations for known American-British English.  Although there are certainly plenty of words that seem “safe” to equate, that begins to feel like a slippery slope in terms of the potential for different meanings or the license author’s intent getting altered.  More specifically, many licenses have definitions for such words.  Past and present tense can also be tricky, both from deciding how and when it’s okay to use either tense.  All in all, I think it’s best to take a very conservative approach to what we will “replace” in terms of templatizing the licenses.  We can always expand, but it would be very hard to roll it back later on.  Just my two cents.

Certainly the BSD and Apache 1.1 licenses are problematic, because they are often verbatim with the exception of the author’s name in the third clause (BSD) and the third, fourth, and fifth clause (Apache 1.1) as well as the disclaimer sections for both.  We are working through how/where to capture this, as well as copyright notices in general, though.



Jilayne


On 3/23/11 10:11 AM, "Kate Stewart" <kate.stewart@...> wrote:


Thanks Daniel,

    Will look into adding this after we can get the guidance from the lawyers as to what varients are equivalent.  ;)   

Kate


--- On Wed, 3/23/11, dmg <dmg@...> wrote:

From: dmg <dmg@...>
Subject: Re: Today's Agenda Legal WorkStream
To: "Esteban Rockett" <mgia3940@...>
Cc: spdx-legal@..., spdx@...
Date: Wednesday, March 23, 2011, 9:48 AM



On Wed, Mar 23, 2011 at 7:40 AM, Esteban Rockett <mgia3940@... </mc/compose?to=mgia3940@...> > wrote:
Agenda Legal WorkStream

(4) Review and Discuss --- Guidelines for "Templatizing" licenses

Please goto:  http://spdx.org/wiki/guidelines-templatizing-licenses


I think it is going in the right direction. You should look at the way Ninka normalizes test  for in-file licenses (BSD, MIT, etc).
For the BSD and MIT variants the problems are not only spelling, but in some cases, variants in grammar: past vs present
tense, use of word "software", "product", "program", "library" in the same place.



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