On 06/15/2012 03:53 PM, Peter Williams wrote:

On Fri Jun 15 14:40:49 2012, RUFFIN, MICHEL (MICHEL) wrote:

But the question is what was the purpose of this initially?

It is a excellent question. I have never understood this purpose of this
"feature" of SPDX so someone else will have to provide the answer.

I suspect that it may be at least partially based on the fact that the SPDX file consists almost exclusively of data collected from original sources, and copyright law (at least as I've been told, I'm no lawyer) doesn't provide my copyright protection at all for aggregation of otherwise available data. In essence, an SPDX file may not adequately constitute a 'work of authorship' that warrants copyright protection, and thus there really wouldn't be a legitimate way to control its distribution via licensing.

This is just a mildly educated guess late on a Friday afternoon, though. I could be 1000% off base :-)

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Kevin P. Fleming
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