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Re: Clarification regarding "FSF legal network" (was Re: Import and export function of SPDX)

Jilayne Lovejoy <jilayne.lovejoy@...>
 

Responses inline below and to this email, since Bradley hit upon several
salient issues :)

On 6/14/12 8:39 AM, "Bradley M. Kuhn" <bkuhn@...> wrote:

RUFFIN, MICHEL (MICHEL) wrote today:
I know that the discussion on this subject should be in FTFE mailing
list.
Actually, I caution against being too quick to move discussion to
ftf-legal mailing list, even if a topic seems off-topic for similar,
public lists.
Would agree to the extent that, considering that what Michel is proposing
doesn't (yet) seem to have a directly on-point mailing list, discussing it
across multiple platforms (and multiple times, in order to finally get a
response ;) seems about right!

ftf-legal is an invite-only mailing list, and thus it's probably not a
good choice for discussion of topics where the Free Software community can
help, since most of the Free Software community can't access ftf-legal.
The list organizers said publicly at LinuxCon Europe 2011 that the
criteria for subscription to ftf-legal are secret, so no one outside of
existing list members actually know what they need to do to qualify for
participation. After my three-year-long Kafkaesque experience of
attempting to subscribe to ftf-legal, I eventually just gave up.
I feel like I need to at least suggest an alternative view for
balance-sakes, especially since, as a member, I have greatly benefited
from the discussions on that list-serve. The network is made up of mostly
lawyers and from all different kinds of organizations and, due to the
Chatham House Rule, provides a space for open conversation among members
without fear of being quoted/attributed outside the network. Given the
reluctance most lawyers have in terms of making public statements, etc,
this is a pretty valuable forum, as it provides a chance to discuss things
that just may not be ready to take public or that a lawyer cannot risk
having attributed or implied to the company he or she works for.

In so far as what Michel is suggesting here re: the license clauses, I can
imagine quite a few companies being quite resistant/hesitant about sharing
this information initially. This is where some discussion that is limited
in its exposure can be helpful to begin to break down that barrier.

Just like scanning, multiple methods of attacking the problem leads to the
best results?? (bad analogy, but seemed fitting ;)


Thus, I'd hate for (even tangentially) relevant discussions to SPDX to
fall into the black hole of private discussion on ftf-legal. As most
subscribers to *this* list know, I've been occasionally critical of SPDX
for various reasons, but I have *no* criticisms about the inclusiveness
and openness of SPDX's process, which are top-notch. Indeed, Martin
invited me to the SPDX list when he chartered it as "FOSS Bazaar Package
Facts". I've lurked on the list since its inception, and I've always been
welcomed to participate (sometimes even by pleading private phone calls
begging me to get more involved in SPDX :).
Lurking is completely fine for whomever. More involvement means more
opportunity to shape the process, so it's up to each participant to
determine their level of participation (just reiterating something said at
the SPDX Forum, for benefit of all).


In April 2012 at the Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit legal track
that I chaired, I explained the reasons that I don't regularly participate
in SPDX. For those who weren't present for that event, the two primary
reasons why I don't actively participate in SPDX are:

(a) SPDX currently has no plans nor mechanism to address the key and
most common FLOSS license compliance problem -- namely, inadequate
and/or missing "scripts to control compilation and installation of the
executable" for GPL'd and/or LGPL'd software. Given my limited time and
wide range of duties, I need to focus any time spent on new
compliance-assistance projects on solutions that will solve that primary
compliance problem before focusing on the (valuable but minor) ones that
SPDX seeks to address. (And many of you know, I've given my endorsement
to the Yocto project, as I think it's a good tool to help address the
key issue of FLOSS compliance. I also encouraged the Yocto project to
work more directly with SPDX, which I understand is now happening.)
I'm not sure it's the role of SPDX to address this problem (at least
directly - the goal/mission in terms of license compliance has been more
of facilitation, than doing the job of compliance itself). In any case -
we all have limited resources/time/energy, but I do think that the various
efforts (yours, SPDX, Yocto, and so forth...) come together at the common
goal of making the use, proliferation, health, compliance with licenses...
of open source software easier for all!



(b) I strongly object to the fact that most of the software being written
by SPDX committee participants utilizing the SPDX format is proprietary
software. I find this not only offensive but also ironic (i.e.,
developing and marketing *proprietary* software to help people better
utilize *Free* Software).
But all the tools coming out of the SPDX working groups are open source!
http://spdx.org/wiki/sandbox-tools (I think there are more than this, but
I'm not the one to appropriately answer that question).
To be fair, of course the companies who have commercial scanning tools are
going to include the ability to generate SPDX files as a feature - because
their customers are asking for it. So, there's both - that can't be all
bad ;)

Jilayne
Re: Import and export function of SPDX

Jilayne Lovejoy <jilayne.lovejoy@...>
 

(Apologies for falling off this exchange - had some other things come up
and am now getting caught up with various responses - lots of great
discussion, though!)

On 6/13/12 9:34 AM, "RUFFIN, MICHEL (MICHEL)"
<michel.ruffin@...> wrote:

So far our FOSS clauses are not aligned on the SPDX standard (we are
already happy when suppliers can comply to our requirements without too
much discussion so we did not formalize things too much)
One thing I noticed immediately about your clauses is the definition of
FOSS - which is quite broad. While I can understand why it might make
sense to use a broad definition for contracts, it includes some categories
of software (e.g. (ii) and (iii) in your definition) that other
people/parties might not consider "FOSS." In terms of the SPDX License
List, for example, I believe (if memory serves) that we discussed to what
"kinds" of licenses should be included on the list and an argument against
including, what I would refer to as "freeware" licenses (usually under
some kind of click-through EULA that more resembles a more traditional,
restrictive IP license, than open source) should not be on the list.
I don't know if this definition's breadth would necessarily create a
conflict in practical reality or not, but thought I'd at least point it
out...



What we request is the name of FOSS, the name of the license if it is OSI
compliant, or a copy of the license if it is not, the nature of the FOSS:
is it a library, a standalone software, an interpreter, ... in order to
determine if there is some potential contamination as with GPL.

Now we have already aligned our database on the SPDX taxonomy for naming
licenses, we will soon ask our suppliers to align on this taxonomy. I
have already prepared a document (in copy) to distribute to our suppliers
and partners on SPDX.
Thanks for sharing this. Really great to hear that you have adopted the
SPDX License List already. I'm not sure if you or anyone from your team
is on the legal work group mailing list, but that may be helpful to stay
on top of issues/updates/discussion there. (for example, a new version of
the license list was just uploaded this week :)

Jilayne

Jilayne Lovejoy | Corporate Counsel
OpenLogic, Inc.

jlovejoy@...
<applewebdata://EAA1F861-B11E-4827-976F-55756901A796/jlovejoy@...
| 720 240 4545





-----Message d'origine-----
De : Jilayne Lovejoy [mailto:jilayne.lovejoy@...]
Envoyé : mercredi 13 juin 2012 16:08
À : RUFFIN, MICHEL (MICHEL); Gary O'Neall; Peter Williams
Cc : spdx-tech@...; spdx@...
Objet : Re: Import and export function of SPDX

Hi Michel,

Thanks again for sharing your information. In regards to your posting (to
both this group and the FSF legal network) about the legal clauses, I have
noticed this and apologize as well for not responding sooner (it's still
in my inbox as a to-do item, sadly). In any case, a couple thoughts. It
is my understanding from your previous email(s), that you'd like to see
some kind of FOSS-related legal clause resource, is that correct? At the
moment, this is not within the scope of SPDX (albeit a great idea
generally!). This is probably something that could be discussed further
in terms of something to consider tackling in the longer-term road map.

More specifically, your "list of FOSS" clause (a)(ii), you require the
name of the license, license text, and whether it is OSI certified or not.
This is all information capture in the SPDX License List. Do you have an
internal list as well? If so, it would be great to discuss aligning any
licenses on your list for potential inclusion on the SPDX License List, if
not already included there and otherwise coordinating.

Cheers,

Jilayne Lovejoy | Corporate Counsel
jlovejoy@... | 720 240 4545
Twitter @jilaynelovejoy

OpenLogic, Inc.
10910 W 120th Ave, Suite 450
Broomfield, Colorado 80021
www.openlogic.com
Twitter @openlogic @cloudswing




On 6/13/12 6:45 AM, "RUFFIN, MICHEL (MICHEL)"
<michel.ruffin@...> wrote:

Gary, I think in my previous mail I expressed our use case:
1) getting information from our suppliers on FOSS included in their
products in order to respect license obligations and to provide this to
our customers
2) automate the work of ALU for accepting this FOSS in our products
3) being able to provide the same information to our customers.

I think it is covered by actual use cases, if not I can do a new one.

Now I would like to attract your attention on a document that I sent few
months ago to this mailing list and also to the FSF legal network group.
Which are the clauses that we put in the contracts with our suppliers and
their rationnal. The goal is to standardize these clauses and I receive
no feedback from anybody on this.

This should illustrate the use case. And I understand that I should use
the FSF legal network to discuss this. But I am very surprised that there
is no reaction/interest in this. It has been a huge ALU effort to shape
these conditions in order to reach acceptance to these conditions by most
companies.

Michel.Ruffin@..., PhD
Software Coordination Manager, Bell Labs, Corporate CTO Dpt
Distinguished Member of Technical Staff
Tel +33 (0) 6 75 25 21 94
Alcatel-Lucent International, Centre de Villarceaux
Route De Villejust, 91620 Nozay, France


-----Message d'origine-----
De : Gary O'Neall [mailto:gary@...]
Envoyé : mardi 12 juin 2012 19:29
À : 'Peter Williams'; RUFFIN, MICHEL (MICHEL)
Cc : spdx-tech@...; spdx@...
Objet : RE: Import and export function of SPDX

I believe the current SPDX tools will treat both RDF and Tag/Value in the
same manner - the documents will be readable by the tools but it will
fail a
validation (missing required field). For the command line tools, the
conversions or pretty printing will still work but you will get warning.

In terms of making the fields optional - I can see this as a valuable
change
for some of the use cases where that information is not available. There
is
need to make sure the components described in the SPDX file match the
actual
file artifacts, but that need can be filled by the per-file information.

Michel - Which use case best describes your use of SPDX
(http://spdx.org/wiki/spdx-20-use-cases). If there isn't a good
representation of your use case(s), could you provide a brief
description?
I want to make sure we cover this when working on SPDX 2.0.

Thanks,
Gary

-----Original Message-----
From: spdx-tech-bounces@...
[mailto:spdx-tech-bounces@...] On Behalf Of Peter Williams
Sent: Tuesday, June 12, 2012 9:27 AM
To: RUFFIN, MICHEL (MICHEL)
Cc: spdx-tech@...; spdx@...
Subject: Re: Import and export function of SPDX

On Tue Jun 12 06:02:03 2012, RUFFIN, MICHEL (MICHEL) wrote:
We have an issue with 2 fields that do not exist in our database.: the
name of the archive file and the checksum. In the SPDX standard they
are mandatory and I do not see why would it be possibly to make them
optional?
I think making those fields optional would be advantageous. Would you
mind
filing a bug[1] so that we don't forget to look into the issue for the
next
version.

As for your immediate issues of not having data for those fields, if you
are
using RDF i'd just skip them altogether in the SPDX file. While your file
will technically be invalid all reasonable SPDX consumers will not have a
problem with that information being absent unless they need it to
accomplish
their goal. (In which case they cannot use your SPDX files, anyway.) If
you
are using the tag-value format skipping the fields altogether will, i
think,
prove problematic due to that format's stricter syntactic constraints.
(Kate
or Gary, can you confirm this?)

[1]:
https://bugs.linuxfoundation.org/enter_bug.cgi?product=SPDX&component=Spe
c

Peter

PS: I am cc-ing the technical working group because it's participants are
best suited to answer these sorts of issues.

_______________________________________________
Spdx-tech mailing list
Spdx-tech@...
https://lists.spdx.org/mailman/listinfo/spdx-tech
Re: FOSS clauses for contracts & fora for discussing it (was Re: Clarification regarding "FSF legal network")

Philip Odence
 

Michel,
Your idea about standard FOSS clauses might fit into the charter of the
Linux Foundation Open Compliance Program.
http://www.linuxfoundation.org/programs/legal/compliance (To head off the
question, the program is for open source compliance in general, not
limited to Linux.)
I am cc'ing Ibrahim who coordinates that for the LF with hopes that he
will weigh in. (I believe, he's out of the office this week, so he may not
respond immediately.)
Phil

On 6/18/12 9:30 AM, "RUFFIN, MICHEL (MICHEL)"
<michel.ruffin@...> wrote:

Thank you very much for your quick answer and suggestions.

My goal is not only to standardize the legal text of our FOSS clauses. It
is also to
1) raise awareness about being able to provide the list of FOSS in a
proprietary product or in a big FOSS distribution (Linux, Open BSD,
Eclipse, Swing, ...)
2) Big companies are reluctant to provide you a FOSS list. They are more
or less in compliance but some of them provide you a URL on their web
site on which you find the list of their products and for each of them a
several megabyte ASCII File with the list of all licenses of FOSS on
their products. That's not usable at all. If one of their customer want
to resale their product in one of its products it has to read everything
and identify every action to comply "Ha yes this is apache1.1 so I have
to put some acknowledgement in my documentation!".
3) Liability clause/money damage. Big companies are not always accepting
it. I have been told by some of their lawyers: how can we guarantee that
we are not doing mistakes this is a too complex world. If you take a
Linux distribution with 6000 package and you look at packages, you can
find hundreds of various licenses in one package. Small companies accept
more easily these conditions, but they have not too much money. How do
you value the fact that you have to stop to distribute your product or
the potential issue to have to disclose your source code while it was not
planned and it is not your fault.
4) .... a lot of other issues

I would challenge the SPDX members to take a Linux standard distribution
and to provide me the SPDX file at file level (not at package level). Yes
open source is great but it is also really a Bazard 8-) and with maven
and cloud computing it will become worse.

So the effort is tremendous and cannot be done by one company, it should
be shared. And it is time to start.

So I will study the short terms options you propose. But for the long
term, I would to start to create a new mailing list of people who are
intereted in discussing FOSS governance standardization issues (to start:
FOSS clause in contracts, having a common Database under a king of
Wikipedia contribution system describing FOSS IP, having public tutorial
on FOSS issues, and perhaps things like lobbying to reduce the number of
FOSS licenses, ...); Martin, can we use the FOSS Bazaar infrastructure to
create the mailing list?

Michel.Ruffin@..., PhD
Software Coordination Manager, Bell Labs, Corporate CTO Dpt
Distinguished Member of Technical Staff
Tel +33 (0) 6 75 25 21 94
Alcatel-Lucent International, Centre de Villarceaux
Route De Villejust, 91620 Nozay, France


-----Message d'origine-----
De : Bradley M. Kuhn [mailto:bkuhn@...]
Envoyé : vendredi 15 juin 2012 19:49
À : RUFFIN, MICHEL (MICHEL)
Cc : spdx@...
Objet : FOSS clauses for contracts & fora for discussing it (was Re:
Clarification regarding "FSF legal network")

Michel,

I went back and read your previous posts from February on this topic,
(as I mentioned earlier in this thread, I don't follow SPDX closely. I
mostly joined this thread (Kibo-like) when the term "FSF" came up).

However, having gotten fully caught up on your posts, I think your idea
is a useful one. In my work doing GPL compliance, I have often had
situations where a downstream company has violated and they never
actually had clear clauses in their contract with upstream about what
would happen if a FLOSS license was violated. This has caused mass
confusion and made it more difficult to get the company into compliance.

In a few cases, there *were* clearly developed clauses like the ones you
mention, and it did indeed facilitate more easy work getting to compliance
on the product.

So, I'm thus supportive of your effort to
promulgate these standardized clauses regarding use of FLOSS in
upstream/downstream contracts. Meanwhile, I wish I had a better
suggestion for you of where to talk about the idea....

RUFFIN, MICHEL (MICHEL) wrote at 08:14 (EDT):
what is your suggestion for me to try to standardize these FOSS
clauses. What organization? I have tried SPDX, I have been advised to
go to FSFE legal network.
... as others have suggested, FOSS Bazaar might be a good place.

I have join the FSFE legal network and I tried to get a reaction
without success except "that's interesting"
It sounds like in addition to my objections to ftf-legal, that there
were other issues: your description seems to indicate ftf-legal wasn't
that interested in this giving useful feedback and collaboration on the
issue!

Any suggestion of organization that would have a look?
There was once a forum called "open-bar", which is at:
https://www.open-bar.org/discussion.html but it's mostly defunct AFAICT.
The mailing lists disappeared a while back. The last email from I have
in my archives for <discuss-general@...> was Tuesday 18 Mar
2008.

Meanwhile, as part of the FOSDEM 2012 Legal and Policy track I
coordinated along with Tom Marble, Richard Fontana, and Karen Sandler,
we had some very brief discussions about creating a forum for discussion
that was open and available to all about these issues (like open bar
was). However, it's unclear if, as a community, we're at a "build it
and they would come" moment, so none of us from the FOSDEM 2012 track
have put effort in.

Thus, at the moment, I think FOSS Bazaar is probably the best place to
host this sort of discussion venue, so I think if you want an immediate
discussion about your specific topic, that's probably the place to
start.

Also, as a medium-term suggestion, I strongly recommend you propose a
talk for (a) the FOSDEM 2013 Legal & Policy track, or (b) LinuxCon
(sadly, North America CFP just closed), or (c) at the 2013 Linux
Collaboration Summit Legal Track (which Richard Fontana & I will
co-chair) about the topic. Speaking about the topic at conferences is a
great way to get interest and feedback.

Long term, as a community, it'd be good to solve this general issue: the
fora that exist for Legal, Licensing and Policy issues in Free Software
are scattered across many different places, and some of the primary ones
are closed clubs. I've been witnessing the problem for years and I
don't have a good solution to propose to solve it.
--
-- bkuhn
_______________________________________________
Spdx mailing list
Spdx@...
https://lists.spdx.org/mailman/listinfo/spdx
FW: License List Matching Guidelines - update

Philip Odence
 

To SPDX General List Members,
The legal team is putting final touches on matching guidelines. In case you have not been following, this is your chance to speak up if you see any show-stoppers. The legal team has been regularly reporting progress on this work, so I don't expect it to be a surprise for anyone, but I want to err on the side of over-communication as these guidelines will have ongoing technical implications.
Best,
Phil

From: Jilayne Lovejoy <jilayne.lovejoy@...>
Date: Thu, 14 Jun 2012 05:08:49 +0000
To: SPDX-legal <spdx-legal@...>
Cc: Phil Odence <podence@...>
Subject: License List Matching Guidelines - update

Hi All, 

We are aiming to finish (at least the first draft of) the SPDX License List Matching Guidelines by the end of June.  To this end, we made some progress on today's legal work stream call, but decided to schedule an additional, off-week call to help facilitate this goal.  

1) please review the updated matching guidelines here:  http://spdx.org/wiki/spdx-license-list-match-guidelines
In particular, note the decision to use {{ }} to indicate text that can be ignored for matching purposes, this applies in particular to the BSD and old Apache licenses.  I have made a first pass at these, but since you won't be able to see them until the new license list is posted, I'm attaching the relevant text files to this email for review/feedback.

2) if you have any additional thoughts or suggestions, please add a comment to that page at the bottom (note there are some comments already posted).  Please comment by end-of-business, next Wednesday, 20 June.

3) attend the special call to discuss all the posted comments and any other outstanding issues: 
Thursday, 21 June at 9am PT / noon ET (immediately after the business team call)
Dial-in: 1.866.740.1260
access: 2404545

4) if we don't complete everything on that call, we will finish up on the regular legal  call on 6/27 (but I hope to wrap up on next Thursday!!)

Let me know if you have any questions.

Cheers,

Jilayne Lovejoy |  Corporate Counsel
OpenLogic, Inc.
jlovejoy@...  |  720 240 4545

?
BSD-3-Clause.txt
?
BSD-4-Clause.txt
?
BSD-2-Clause.txt
?
Apache-1.1.txt
?
Apache-1.0.txt

Re: Package Verification Code (section 4.7)

Gary O'Neall
 

Hi Marc-Etienne,

Responses inline below....

An example implementation of the 1.1 verification code can be found at
http://git.spdx.org/?p=spdx-tools.git;a=blob;f=src/org/spdx/rdfparser/Verifi
cationCodeGenerator.java;h=3c15b8b420fa1a5d5c5ed72d548c0cb43330d28c;hb=HEAD

Gary

-----Original Message-----
From: spdx-bounces@... [mailto:spdx-bounces@...] On
Behalf Of Marc-Etienne Vargenau
Sent: Tuesday, June 19, 2012 7:33 AM
To: spdx@...
Subject: Package Verification Code (section 4.7)

Hello,

The text of Package Verification Code (section 4.7) has been changed from
SPDX 1.0 to SPDX 1.1 draft.

1) Does that mean that the algorithm changed or is it just described better?
[Gary] See bug 968 (https://bugs.linuxfoundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=968)
for a description of the problems and fixes in the Package Verification code
algorithm.

2) After sorting, the CR/LF must be removed before applying SHA1?
[Gary] Correct

3) The text in SPDX 1.1 draft refers to "normalized_filename"
but this is no longer defined.
[Gary] This is probably a bug in the spec - if you don't mind, go ahead and
add a bug for this. BTW - the normalized filename was more critical in the
previous algorithms since it included the filename in the checksum
calculation. A fix for the documentation may just be removing the
referenced and calling it just a filename.

Best regards,

Marc-Etienne

--
Marc-Etienne Vargenau
Alcatel-Lucent France, Route de Villejust, 91620 NOZAY, FRANCE
+33 (0)1 30 77 28 33, Marc-Etienne.Vargenau@...
_______________________________________________
Spdx mailing list
Spdx@...
https://lists.spdx.org/mailman/listinfo/spdx
Re: Compilation of SPDX tools

Gary O'Neall
 

Hi Marc-Etienne,

I am expecting to have the tools posted for the 1.1 spec by July 9th. We
still have a few more items to close on for the spec, so the schedule is
subject to change.

I'll post a note to the spdx tech list once the tools have been published.

Gary

-----Original Message-----
From: Marc-Etienne Vargenau
[mailto:Marc-Etienne.Vargenau@...]
Sent: Monday, June 18, 2012 2:33 AM
To: Gary O'Neall
Cc: spdx@...
Subject: Re: Compilation of SPDX tools

Le 15/06/2012 20:47, Gary O'Neall a écrit :
Hi Marc-Etienne,

There is a more recent version at http://spdx.org/content/tools This
page will become active once the new website is up and running. Let
me know if you have any trouble accessing the page.
Hi Gary,

Thanks, I could download the tools from this page.

The most recent checked in code is a bit in flux as we have not
completely nailed down the SPDX 1.1 changes. Once we finalize the 1.1
spec, I'll compile and upload a 1.1 compliant version of the tools.
When is the final SPDX 1.1 expected?

BTW - If you use an Eclipse development environment, there is project
meta data checked in which will allow the code to be compiled in the IDE.
I do not, but I will try that.

Best regards,

Marc-Etienne

--
Marc-Etienne Vargenau
Alcatel-Lucent France, Route de Villejust, 91620 NOZAY, FRANCE
+33 (0)1 30 77 28 33, Marc-Etienne.Vargenau@...
Package Verification Code (section 4.7)

Marc-Etienne Vargenau
 

Hello,

The text of Package Verification Code (section 4.7) has been
changed from SPDX 1.0 to SPDX 1.1 draft.

1) Does that mean that the algorithm changed or is it just
described better?

2) After sorting, the CR/LF must be removed before applying SHA1?

3) The text in SPDX 1.1 draft refers to "normalized_filename"
but this is no longer defined.

Best regards,

Marc-Etienne

--
Marc-Etienne Vargenau
Alcatel-Lucent France, Route de Villejust, 91620 NOZAY, FRANCE
+33 (0)1 30 77 28 33, Marc-Etienne.Vargenau@...
Re: TR: SPDX standard: files are placed in public domain

Bradley M. Kuhn <bkuhn@...>
 

Kevin Fleming wrote at 17:05 (EDT) on Friday:
[An] SPDX file consists almost exclusively of data collected from
original sources, and copyright law.... 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.
I'd suspect strongly that there *is* an arrangement copyright on the
arrangement someone makes. I hope SPDX has done something to deal with
this fact.

Arrangement copyrights are usually pretty thin, but I do think that
arranging data into an SPDX file is a creative expression. It's clear
from reading the spec that there's different ways to arrange the same
data into an SPDX file.
--
-- bkuhn
Re: FOSS clauses for contracts & fora for discussing it (was Re: Clarification regarding "FSF legal network")

RUFFIN MICHEL
 

Thank you very much for your quick answer and suggestions.

My goal is not only to standardize the legal text of our FOSS clauses. It is also to
1) raise awareness about being able to provide the list of FOSS in a proprietary product or in a big FOSS distribution (Linux, Open BSD, Eclipse, Swing, ...)
2) Big companies are reluctant to provide you a FOSS list. They are more or less in compliance but some of them provide you a URL on their web site on which you find the list of their products and for each of them a several megabyte ASCII File with the list of all licenses of FOSS on their products. That's not usable at all. If one of their customer want to resale their product in one of its products it has to read everything and identify every action to comply "Ha yes this is apache1.1 so I have to put some acknowledgement in my documentation!".
3) Liability clause/money damage. Big companies are not always accepting it. I have been told by some of their lawyers: how can we guarantee that we are not doing mistakes this is a too complex world. If you take a Linux distribution with 6000 package and you look at packages, you can find hundreds of various licenses in one package. Small companies accept more easily these conditions, but they have not too much money. How do you value the fact that you have to stop to distribute your product or the potential issue to have to disclose your source code while it was not planned and it is not your fault.
4) .... a lot of other issues

I would challenge the SPDX members to take a Linux standard distribution and to provide me the SPDX file at file level (not at package level). Yes open source is great but it is also really a Bazard 8-) and with maven and cloud computing it will become worse.

So the effort is tremendous and cannot be done by one company, it should be shared. And it is time to start.

So I will study the short terms options you propose. But for the long term, I would to start to create a new mailing list of people who are intereted in discussing FOSS governance standardization issues (to start: FOSS clause in contracts, having a common Database under a king of Wikipedia contribution system describing FOSS IP, having public tutorial on FOSS issues, and perhaps things like lobbying to reduce the number of FOSS licenses, ...); Martin, can we use the FOSS Bazaar infrastructure to create the mailing list?

Michel.Ruffin@..., PhD
Software Coordination Manager, Bell Labs, Corporate CTO Dpt
Distinguished Member of Technical Staff
Tel +33 (0) 6 75 25 21 94
Alcatel-Lucent International, Centre de Villarceaux
Route De Villejust, 91620 Nozay, France

-----Message d'origine-----
De : Bradley M. Kuhn [mailto:bkuhn@...]
Envoyé : vendredi 15 juin 2012 19:49
À : RUFFIN, MICHEL (MICHEL)
Cc : spdx@...
Objet : FOSS clauses for contracts & fora for discussing it (was Re: Clarification regarding "FSF legal network")

Michel,

I went back and read your previous posts from February on this topic,
(as I mentioned earlier in this thread, I don't follow SPDX closely. I
mostly joined this thread (Kibo-like) when the term "FSF" came up).

However, having gotten fully caught up on your posts, I think your idea
is a useful one. In my work doing GPL compliance, I have often had
situations where a downstream company has violated and they never
actually had clear clauses in their contract with upstream about what
would happen if a FLOSS license was violated. This has caused mass
confusion and made it more difficult to get the company into compliance.

In a few cases, there *were* clearly developed clauses like the ones you
mention, and it did indeed facilitate more easy work getting to compliance
on the product.

So, I'm thus supportive of your effort to
promulgate these standardized clauses regarding use of FLOSS in
upstream/downstream contracts. Meanwhile, I wish I had a better
suggestion for you of where to talk about the idea....

RUFFIN, MICHEL (MICHEL) wrote at 08:14 (EDT):
what is your suggestion for me to try to standardize these FOSS
clauses. What organization? I have tried SPDX, I have been advised to
go to FSFE legal network.
... as others have suggested, FOSS Bazaar might be a good place.

I have join the FSFE legal network and I tried to get a reaction
without success except "that's interesting"
It sounds like in addition to my objections to ftf-legal, that there
were other issues: your description seems to indicate ftf-legal wasn't
that interested in this giving useful feedback and collaboration on the
issue!

Any suggestion of organization that would have a look?
There was once a forum called "open-bar", which is at:
https://www.open-bar.org/discussion.html but it's mostly defunct AFAICT.
The mailing lists disappeared a while back. The last email from I have
in my archives for <discuss-general@...> was Tuesday 18 Mar
2008.

Meanwhile, as part of the FOSDEM 2012 Legal and Policy track I
coordinated along with Tom Marble, Richard Fontana, and Karen Sandler,
we had some very brief discussions about creating a forum for discussion
that was open and available to all about these issues (like open bar
was). However, it's unclear if, as a community, we're at a "build it
and they would come" moment, so none of us from the FOSDEM 2012 track
have put effort in.

Thus, at the moment, I think FOSS Bazaar is probably the best place to
host this sort of discussion venue, so I think if you want an immediate
discussion about your specific topic, that's probably the place to
start.

Also, as a medium-term suggestion, I strongly recommend you propose a
talk for (a) the FOSDEM 2013 Legal & Policy track, or (b) LinuxCon
(sadly, North America CFP just closed), or (c) at the 2013 Linux
Collaboration Summit Legal Track (which Richard Fontana & I will
co-chair) about the topic. Speaking about the topic at conferences is a
great way to get interest and feedback.

Long term, as a community, it'd be good to solve this general issue: the
fora that exist for Legal, Licensing and Policy issues in Free Software
are scattered across many different places, and some of the primary ones
are closed clubs. I've been witnessing the problem for years and I
don't have a good solution to propose to solve it.
--
-- bkuhn
Re: Compilation of SPDX tools

Marc-Etienne Vargenau
 

Le 15/06/2012 20:47, Gary O'Neall a écrit :
Hi Marc-Etienne,

There is a more recent version at http://spdx.org/content/tools This page
will become active once the new website is up and running. Let me know if
you have any trouble accessing the page.
Hi Gary,

Thanks, I could download the tools from this page.

The most recent checked in code is a bit in flux as we have not completely
nailed down the SPDX 1.1 changes. Once we finalize the 1.1 spec, I'll
compile and upload a 1.1 compliant version of the tools.
When is the final SPDX 1.1 expected?

BTW - If you use an Eclipse development environment, there is project meta
data checked in which will allow the code to be compiled in the IDE.
I do not, but I will try that.

Best regards,

Marc-Etienne

--
Marc-Etienne Vargenau
Alcatel-Lucent France, Route de Villejust, 91620 NOZAY, FRANCE
+33 (0)1 30 77 28 33, Marc-Etienne.Vargenau@...
Re: TR: SPDX standard: files are placed in public domain

RUFFIN MICHEL
 

It is not a definite answer, but discussing with our people implementing the spec (marc-Etienne in cc)it seems that the checksums would be usefull to compare package between companies, but I do not see a need for the package tar name

Michel.Ruffin@..., PhD
Software Coordination Manager, Bell Labs, Corporate CTO Dpt
Distinguished Member of Technical Staff
Tel +33 (0) 6 75 25 21 94
Alcatel-Lucent International, Centre de Villarceaux
Route De Villejust, 91620 Nozay, France

-----Message d'origine-----
De : spdx-bounces@... [mailto:spdx-bounces@...] De la part de Kevin P. Fleming
Envoyé : vendredi 15 juin 2012 23:06
À : spdx@...
Objet : Re: TR: SPDX standard: files are placed in public domain

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 :-)

--
Kevin P. Fleming
Digium, Inc. | Director of Software Technologies
Jabber: kfleming@... | SIP: kpfleming@... | Skype: kpfleming
445 Jan Davis Drive NW - Huntsville, AL 35806 - USA
Check us out at www.digium.com & www.asterisk.org
_______________________________________________
Spdx mailing list
Spdx@...
https://lists.spdx.org/mailman/listinfo/spdx
Re: TR: SPDX standard: files are placed in public domain

Kevin P. Fleming <kpfleming@...>
 

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 :-)

--
Kevin P. Fleming
Digium, Inc. | Director of Software Technologies
Jabber: kfleming@... | SIP: kpfleming@... | Skype: kpfleming
445 Jan Davis Drive NW - Huntsville, AL 35806 - USA
Check us out at www.digium.com & www.asterisk.org
Re: TR: SPDX standard: files are placed in public domain

Peter Williams <peter.williams@...>
 

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.

Peter
Re: TR: SPDX standard: files are placed in public domain

RUFFIN MICHEL
 

I need to think a little bit about it with our lawyers on the potential consequences before answering you.

What I want is freedom, to exchange information between companies without constraints. If we need constraints, we put it in the contract. It is not to SPDX to put the constraints.

Let us time to think about consequences/consraints, ... before addressing the issue. But the question is what was the purpose of this initially?

Michel.Ruffin@..., PhD
Software Coordination Manager, Bell Labs, Corporate CTO Dpt
Distinguished Member of Technical Staff
Tel +33 (0) 6 75 25 21 94
Alcatel-Lucent International, Centre de Villarceaux
Route De Villejust, 91620 Nozay, France

-----Message d'origine-----
De : Peter Williams [mailto:peter.williams@...]
Envoyé : vendredi 15 juin 2012 22:25
À : RUFFIN, MICHEL (MICHEL)
Cc : Freedman, Barry H (Barry); spdx@...
Objet : Re: TR: SPDX standard: files are placed in public domain

On Fri Jun 15 09:37:17 2012, RUFFIN, MICHEL (MICHEL) wrote:
I am not very happy that data must be made in public domain. For the
following reasons:

- ALU should not be responsible of the data if we export it. And I
understand that ther e is a clause that loow us to do exception (ALU
name not exported with the data, but it should be the other way around
by default any export file should not imply any responsibility from
exporting company).

- if by mischance there are some comments which we will not want to
share with the rest of the world. It should be protected by the
licensing conditions.
Just to clarify, is it your desire to be allowed to license SPDX files
that you produce under terms of your choice? Or are you suggesting that
we change the required licensing of SPDX to include a disclaimer of
some sort?

Regarding the second bullet, can you provide examples of scenarios
where confidentiality agreements (which until now have been the
proposed solution to this problem) between you and your partners would
be insufficient?

Thanks in advance,
Peter
Re: TR: SPDX standard: files are placed in public domain

Peter Williams <peter.williams@...>
 

On Fri Jun 15 09:37:17 2012, RUFFIN, MICHEL (MICHEL) wrote:
I am not very happy that data must be made in public domain. For the
following reasons:

- ALU should not be responsible of the data if we export it. And I
understand that ther e is a clause that loow us to do exception (ALU
name not exported with the data, but it should be the other way around
by default any export file should not imply any responsibility from
exporting company).

- if by mischance there are some comments which we will not want to
share with the rest of the world. It should be protected by the
licensing conditions.
Just to clarify, is it your desire to be allowed to license SPDX files that you produce under terms of your choice? Or are you suggesting that we change the required licensing of SPDX to include a disclaimer of some sort?

Regarding the second bullet, can you provide examples of scenarios where confidentiality agreements (which until now have been the proposed solution to this problem) between you and your partners would be insufficient?

Thanks in advance,
Peter
Re: FOSS clauses for contracts & fora for discussing it (was Re: Clarification regarding "FSF legal network")

RUFFIN MICHEL
 

First I Would like enlighten that when I speak on the SPDX or FSFE mailing list I speak for the Alcatel-Lucent company; I check before with our FOSS executive committee that I can say things (in most of the cases 8-). But I am not a lawyer and I know this might be tricky discussions in term of company and what you have said. So What I say is not officially the Company stamped decision in term of legal (except if stamped) but it is the rough direction of the company, However it reflects the company policy. Barry Freedman is the official guy to accept or not what I am saying. I guess it is important to notice this.

So Barry and myself are more or less co-directing the Alcatel-lucent internal Executive committee since 2007. He is the lawyer, I am the technical guy with a bit of paralegal training (we have 8 or 10 other members in this committee).

So today our points are the following

1) SPDX standard. After discussing with Marc-Etienne who is trying to align our FOSS DB on the SPDX standard we will have to add SHA-1 checksums to our DB. Since we have not that we will look to partners to provide us the data. But in any case we will not have them for all/old entries, so the SPDX standard needs to cope with this kind of situation.

1 bis) what modification we need to do to SDPX standard when we are not able to provide it and to be able to export information.

1 ter) we have issue with the licensing issues of data when coming from SPDX standard: data are public domain with some restriction, but it is not clear

2)Alcatel-Lucent FOSS clauses in suppliers contracts. What group I should contact for standardization of these clauses?

3) Alcatel-lucent is willing to "open source" its FOSS DB Who is interested and how to make this things works

4) Alcatel-Lucent has a lot of tutorials on open source; It is a tremendous work to maintain them, they have been registered on webinar, we are now thinking to update everything and to translate them in foreign languages such as Chinese. Perhaps we can share this effort

Should we create a FOSS governance task force? If SPDX is not the good place, If SFSE legal network is not the good place, tell me where!

Alcatel-lucent is committed to respect the open source licences philosophies (not only the legal part of it) but we need help because this is far to be clear.

That's my Friday evening email, Please think about this, we need to put our forces together.

Michel
Michel.Ruffin@..., PhD
Software Coordination Manager, Bell Labs, Corporate CTO Dpt
Distinguished Member of Technical Staff
Tel +33 (0) 6 75 25 21 94
Alcatel-Lucent International, Centre de Villarceaux
Route De Villejust, 91620 Nozay, France

-----Message d'origine-----
De : Bradley M. Kuhn [mailto:bkuhn@...]
Envoyé : vendredi 15 juin 2012 19:49
À : RUFFIN, MICHEL (MICHEL)
Cc : spdx@...
Objet : FOSS clauses for contracts & fora for discussing it (was Re: Clarification regarding "FSF legal network")

Michel,

I went back and read your previous posts from February on this topic,
(as I mentioned earlier in this thread, I don't follow SPDX closely. I
mostly joined this thread (Kibo-like) when the term "FSF" came up).

However, having gotten fully caught up on your posts, I think your idea
is a useful one. In my work doing GPL compliance, I have often had
situations where a downstream company has violated and they never
actually had clear clauses in their contract with upstream about what
would happen if a FLOSS license was violated. This has caused mass
confusion and made it more difficult to get the company into compliance.

In a few cases, there *were* clearly developed clauses like the ones you
mention, and it did indeed facilitate more easy work getting to compliance
on the product.

So, I'm thus supportive of your effort to
promulgate these standardized clauses regarding use of FLOSS in
upstream/downstream contracts. Meanwhile, I wish I had a better
suggestion for you of where to talk about the idea....

RUFFIN, MICHEL (MICHEL) wrote at 08:14 (EDT):
what is your suggestion for me to try to standardize these FOSS
clauses. What organization? I have tried SPDX, I have been advised to
go to FSFE legal network.
... as others have suggested, FOSS Bazaar might be a good place.

I have join the FSFE legal network and I tried to get a reaction
without success except "that's interesting"
It sounds like in addition to my objections to ftf-legal, that there
were other issues: your description seems to indicate ftf-legal wasn't
that interested in this giving useful feedback and collaboration on the
issue!

Any suggestion of organization that would have a look?
There was once a forum called "open-bar", which is at:
https://www.open-bar.org/discussion.html but it's mostly defunct AFAICT.
The mailing lists disappeared a while back. The last email from I have
in my archives for <discuss-general@...> was Tuesday 18 Mar
2008.

Meanwhile, as part of the FOSDEM 2012 Legal and Policy track I
coordinated along with Tom Marble, Richard Fontana, and Karen Sandler,
we had some very brief discussions about creating a forum for discussion
that was open and available to all about these issues (like open bar
was). However, it's unclear if, as a community, we're at a "build it
and they would come" moment, so none of us from the FOSDEM 2012 track
have put effort in.

Thus, at the moment, I think FOSS Bazaar is probably the best place to
host this sort of discussion venue, so I think if you want an immediate
discussion about your specific topic, that's probably the place to
start.

Also, as a medium-term suggestion, I strongly recommend you propose a
talk for (a) the FOSDEM 2013 Legal & Policy track, or (b) LinuxCon
(sadly, North America CFP just closed), or (c) at the 2013 Linux
Collaboration Summit Legal Track (which Richard Fontana & I will
co-chair) about the topic. Speaking about the topic at conferences is a
great way to get interest and feedback.

Long term, as a community, it'd be good to solve this general issue: the
fora that exist for Legal, Licensing and Policy issues in Free Software
are scattered across many different places, and some of the primary ones
are closed clubs. I've been witnessing the problem for years and I
don't have a good solution to propose to solve it.
--
-- bkuhn
Re: Compilation of SPDX tools

Gary O'Neall
 

Hi Marc-Etienne,

There is a more recent version at http://spdx.org/content/tools This page
will become active once the new website is up and running. Let me know if
you have any trouble accessing the page.

The most recent checked in code is a bit in flux as we have not completely
nailed down the SPDX 1.1 changes. Once we finalize the 1.1 spec, I'll
compile and upload a 1.1 compliant version of the tools.

BTW - If you use an Eclipse development environment, there is project meta
data checked in which will allow the code to be compiled in the IDE.

Gary

-----Original Message-----
From: spdx-bounces@... [mailto:spdx-bounces@...] On
Behalf Of Marc-Etienne Vargenau
Sent: Friday, June 15, 2012 7:44 AM
To: spdx@...
Subject: Compilation of SPDX tools

Hello,

The compiled version et the Java tools in this page:
http://www.spdx.org/tools
is rather old compared to the source code found in
http://git.spdx.org/?p=spdx-tools.git;a=summary

Can someone please compile the latest source code and upload the result to
the tools page?

I tried to compile it myself but did not succeed.
The Gem from my Ubuntu seems to be incompatible.

Thank for yor help.

Marc-Etienne

--
Marc-Etienne Vargenau
Alcatel-Lucent France, Route de Villejust, 91620 NOZAY, FRANCE
+33 (0)1 30 77 28 33, Marc-Etienne.Vargenau@...
_______________________________________________
Spdx mailing list
Spdx@...
https://lists.spdx.org/mailman/listinfo/spdx
Re: FOSS clauses for contracts & fora for discussing it (was Re: Clarification regarding "FSF legal network")

Kevin P. Fleming <kpfleming@...>
 

On 06/15/2012 12:49 PM, Bradley M. Kuhn wrote:
Long term, as a community, it'd be good to solve this general issue: the
fora that exist for Legal, Licensing and Policy issues in Free Software
are scattered across many different places, and some of the primary ones
are closed clubs. I've been witnessing the problem for years and I
don't have a good solution to propose to solve it.
For what it's worth, you are not alone in wanting to find a solution to this problem :-) The lack of knowledge sharing in the Free Software legal community is disappointing, although the SPDX effort is one step to help with part of that problem.

--
Kevin P. Fleming
Digium, Inc. | Director of Software Technologies
Jabber: kfleming@... | SIP: kpfleming@... | Skype: kpfleming
445 Jan Davis Drive NW - Huntsville, AL 35806 - USA
Check us out at www.digium.com & www.asterisk.org
FOSS clauses for contracts & fora for discussing it (was Re: Clarification regarding "FSF legal network")

Bradley M. Kuhn <bkuhn@...>
 

Michel,

I went back and read your previous posts from February on this topic,
(as I mentioned earlier in this thread, I don't follow SPDX closely. I
mostly joined this thread (Kibo-like) when the term "FSF" came up).

However, having gotten fully caught up on your posts, I think your idea
is a useful one. In my work doing GPL compliance, I have often had
situations where a downstream company has violated and they never
actually had clear clauses in their contract with upstream about what
would happen if a FLOSS license was violated. This has caused mass
confusion and made it more difficult to get the company into compliance.

In a few cases, there *were* clearly developed clauses like the ones you
mention, and it did indeed facilitate more easy work getting to compliance
on the product.

So, I'm thus supportive of your effort to
promulgate these standardized clauses regarding use of FLOSS in
upstream/downstream contracts. Meanwhile, I wish I had a better
suggestion for you of where to talk about the idea....

RUFFIN, MICHEL (MICHEL) wrote at 08:14 (EDT):
what is your suggestion for me to try to standardize these FOSS
clauses. What organization? I have tried SPDX, I have been advised to
go to FSFE legal network.
... as others have suggested, FOSS Bazaar might be a good place.

I have join the FSFE legal network and I tried to get a reaction
without success except "that's interesting"
It sounds like in addition to my objections to ftf-legal, that there
were other issues: your description seems to indicate ftf-legal wasn't
that interested in this giving useful feedback and collaboration on the
issue!

Any suggestion of organization that would have a look?
There was once a forum called "open-bar", which is at:
https://www.open-bar.org/discussion.html but it's mostly defunct AFAICT.
The mailing lists disappeared a while back. The last email from I have
in my archives for <discuss-general@...> was Tuesday 18 Mar
2008.

Meanwhile, as part of the FOSDEM 2012 Legal and Policy track I
coordinated along with Tom Marble, Richard Fontana, and Karen Sandler,
we had some very brief discussions about creating a forum for discussion
that was open and available to all about these issues (like open bar
was). However, it's unclear if, as a community, we're at a "build it
and they would come" moment, so none of us from the FOSDEM 2012 track
have put effort in.

Thus, at the moment, I think FOSS Bazaar is probably the best place to
host this sort of discussion venue, so I think if you want an immediate
discussion about your specific topic, that's probably the place to
start.

Also, as a medium-term suggestion, I strongly recommend you propose a
talk for (a) the FOSDEM 2013 Legal & Policy track, or (b) LinuxCon
(sadly, North America CFP just closed), or (c) at the 2013 Linux
Collaboration Summit Legal Track (which Richard Fontana & I will
co-chair) about the topic. Speaking about the topic at conferences is a
great way to get interest and feedback.

Long term, as a community, it'd be good to solve this general issue: the
fora that exist for Legal, Licensing and Policy issues in Free Software
are scattered across many different places, and some of the primary ones
are closed clubs. I've been witnessing the problem for years and I
don't have a good solution to propose to solve it.
--
-- bkuhn
TR: SPDX standard: files are placed in public domain

RUFFIN MICHEL
 

Dear all, once again on a different topic within our current effort in implementing the SPDX standard.

 

Here it is a licensing issue.

 

I am not very comfortable with the licensing issue for the data when using the standard. See the quick Analysis of Barry below our Senior attorney on IP issues and I have a quick chat today with him on that subject.

 

I am not very happy that data must be made in public domain. For the following reasons:

-  ALU should not be responsible of the data if we export it. And I understand that ther e is a clause that loow us to do exception (ALU name not exported with the data, but it should be the other way around by default any export file should not imply any responsibility from exporting company).

- if by mischance there are some comments which we will not want to share with the rest of the world. It should be protected by the licensing conditions.

 

Legally speaking implementing a format that implies some obligation on the data is unclear.

 

So my question is what is the rational for these licensing conditions and can we alleviate them a bit?

 

Michel.Ruffin@..., PhD
Software Coordination Manager, Bell Labs, Corporate CTO Dpt
Distinguished Member of Technical Staff
Tel +33 (0) 6 75 25 21 94
Alcatel-Lucent International, Centre de Villarceaux
Route De Villejust, 91620 Nozay, France

De : Freedman, Barry H (Barry)
Envoyé : mercredi 13 juin 2012 23:12
Objet : RE: SPDX standard: files are placed in public domain

 

Michel and all:  I have looked at the Open Data Commons Public Domain Dedication and License 1.0 (“PDDL-1.0”), which is the license for SPDX 1.0, and also

Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal license, which is the license for SPDX1.1.  They are both essentially the same, in that they place the SPDX file itself in the public domain, meaning that we have no further copyright rights therein.  But, both versions also make it clear that we can temporarily or permanently limit, by a separate and independent agreement, recipients from (i) distribution of a specific aggregation (collection) of SPDX files to others or (ii) disclosing ALU  as the source and/or creator of any specific SPDX file(s).

 

So, we need to be comfortable that the SPDX file itself (including comments in the file) does not contain anything that we do not want to dedicate.  Perhaps we can discuss this further at the next FOSS EC meeting.

 

Let me know if there are questions.  Thx. Barry

Corporate-sig-logo

 

Barry H. Freedman
Senior Intellectual Property Attorney

Intellectual Property and Standards
IP Law Services Group
600-700 Mountain Avenue
Room 3A-239
Murray Hill, New Jersey 07974
Office: 908-582-4060

Cell:  908-692-6773
e-mail freedman@...

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