Could you change the instructions to explicitly allow submission by
email? Thanks!

Jilayne Lovejoy wrote at 20:48 (PDT) on Wednesday:

It already did actually say this, but the wording was a bit awkward
and the email address was not hyper-linked, so I have fixed both.

Thanks!

--
-- bkuhn

Could you change the instructions to explicitly allow submission by
email? Thanks!

It already did actually say this, but the wording was a bit awkward and
the email address was not hyper-linked, so I have fixed both.

Jilayne

I wrote:

GPL-2.0-with-GCC-exception from the list, and I didn't see any
instructions on SPDX's site on how to propose a comprehensive change
like that.

Jilayne Lovejoy wrote at 13:04 (PDT) on Friday:

We have endeavored to NOT remove licenses from the list once added. I
don't understand why you'd want to remove this? Isn't it possible to
still come across old versions (of any license) "in the wild?" (I know
I have.)

Can you show me examples of software packages that use
GPLv2-only-with-GCC-Exception? I'm amazed to learn that there's a
package that uses it. I believe it was mentioned earlier on this thread
that GCC doesn't even use that license.

Originally, the instructions just said to submit the information for
the license being suggested via email (including the license text).
But it was pointed out that some people may find the spreadsheet
easier as the fields could already be included for prompting and also
if one was submitting multiple licenses.

Could you change the instructions to explicitly allow submission by
email? Thanks!
--
-- bkuhn

On 7/13/12 1:32 PM, "Bradley M. Kuhn" <bkuhn@...> wrote:

Philip Odence wrote at 11:52 (EDT) on Thursday:

Suprisingly after all the recent discussion on the General Meerting
list about expanding the list, no one has submitted any more licenses.

FWIW, I looked at this possibility briefly. Upon reading
http://spdx.org/wiki/spdx-license-list-process-requesting-new-licenses-be-
added
I came to the conclusion that I couldn't easily submit any of the
licenses I was thinking of, such as GCC's license, which is effectively
GPLv3-or-later-with-GCC-RTLv3.1-or-later.

Mainly, it's tough to meet submission requirement (3). There's no URL
for that license. GCC RTL 3.1 has one URL, GPLv3 has another, but
what's the URL for the combo with appropriate -or-laters? There is
none.

If there is no url, then there is no url - just state this. However, in
this scenario, I would simply include the two you mention above. The
field need not have only one url (e.g. For licenses that are OSI approved,
I have included both the OSI link as well as the license author's link,
where found).

The SPDX list itself clearly
envisioned this fact, as things like "GPL-2.0-with-autoconf-exception"
already appear. But, those existing listings fail to account for how
the exceptions actually are used in real world programs, as discussed in
the threads over the last month.

As I thought was explained previously, there has already been several
discussions on the legal calls on how to best deal with the various GPL
exceptions. I don't think anyone would claim we have come up with the
best solution, and this has been something that has been recognized as
needing more discussion and work. Alternative proposals and a description
of how to implement are always encouraged (as well as help doing the
actual work...) - from anyone.

Thus, if I were to formally propose GCC's license, it'd have to be part
of a broader proposal I'd have to also propose removal of
GPL-2.0-with-GCC-exception from the list, and I didn't see any
instructions on SPDX's site on how to propose a comprehensive change
like that.

We have endeavored to NOT remove licenses from the list once added. I
don't understand why you'd want to remove this? Isn't it possible to
still come across old versions (of any license) "in the wild?" (I know I
have.) In fact, we have tried to make sure we captured all versions of
licenses on the list (with the exception of more work needing to be done
on capturing at least a majority of the GPL-exceptions, as already stated.)
In any case, any suggestion for which there is not a "formal" process can
simply go through this mailing list, as you have done :)

Finally, the (admittedly more of a pet-peeve) last straw that led me to
give up was I saw that I had to download and open a zip file
(http://spdx.org/system/files/spdx_license_list_v1.16.zip ) just to grab
a text version of the list, and that to make the submission, I had to
fill out a spreadsheet (
http://spdx.org/system/files/spdx_licenselist-new-licenses.ods ) rather
than just use text editor to edit a file. I much appreciate that ODS
format is used, of course, but most of us old-school Free Software
licensing people don't use spreadsheet programs very often, even Free
Software ones, and certainly not merely to submit text and URLs.

I'm not sure why you needed to download the zip file to make the
submission for a new license - you can just create your own. As far as
the spreadsheet is concerned - that was just recently added to provide
another option. Originally, the instructions just said to submit the
information for the license being suggested via email (including the
license text). But it was pointed out that some people may find the
spreadsheet easier as the fields could already be included for prompting
and also if one was submitting multiple licenses.

In any case, thanks for reading through the process and the requirements
for each field so carefully. You may be the first person (that I know of,
anyway) to have done so. Such "testing" is helpful to make the
explanation easier to understand and improve the process.

Philip Odence wrote at 11:52 (EDT) on Thursday:

Suprisingly after all the recent discussion on the General Meerting
list about expanding the list, no one has submitted any more licenses.

FWIW, I looked at this possibility briefly. Upon reading
http://spdx.org/wiki/spdx-license-list-process-requesting-new-licenses-be-added
I came to the conclusion that I couldn't easily submit any of the
licenses I was thinking of, such as GCC's license, which is effectively
GPLv3-or-later-with-GCC-RTLv3.1-or-later.

Mainly, it's tough to meet submission requirement (3). There's no URL
for that license. GCC RTL 3.1 has one URL, GPLv3 has another, but
what's the URL for the combo with appropriate -or-laters? There is
none.

This sort of goes to the heart of the problem with how the SPDX license
list is structured. SPDX's goal is ostensibly to document the "real
world" license uses. But, licenses occurring in the real world aren't
just by themselves, especially in key infrastructure programs like GCC.
They occur in these nuanced ways. The SPDX list itself clearly
envisioned this fact, as things like "GPL-2.0-with-autoconf-exception"
already appear. But, those existing listings fail to account for how
the exceptions actually are used in real world programs, as discussed in
the threads over the last month.

Thus, if I were to formally propose GCC's license, it'd have to be part
of a broader proposal I'd have to also propose removal of
GPL-2.0-with-GCC-exception from the list, and I didn't see any
instructions on SPDX's site on how to propose a comprehensive change
like that.

Finally, the (admittedly more of a pet-peeve) last straw that led me to
give up was I saw that I had to download and open a zip file
(http://spdx.org/system/files/spdx_license_list_v1.16.zip ) just to grab
a text version of the list, and that to make the submission, I had to
fill out a spreadsheet (
http://spdx.org/system/files/spdx_licenselist-new-licenses.ods ) rather
than just use text editor to edit a file. I much appreciate that ODS
format is used, of course, but most of us old-school Free Software
licensing people don't use spreadsheet programs very often, even Free
Software ones, and certainly not merely to submit text and URLs.

Again, I renew my offer to assist anyone who wants to undertake the task
to write an SPDX file for GCC (or indeed for *any* FSF or Conservancy
package), but the barriers above made me sure I didn't want to take a
proactive role here.
--
-- bkuhn

Great, Bradley. When I find someone who will *do* that work, we will
definitely ask for you input!

- Jilayne

On Fri, Jun 29, 2012 at 10:19 AM, Peter Williams
<peter.williams@...> wrote:

On Fri Jun 29 07:04:27 2012, Philip Odence wrote:

Polite request:
Could we shift this discussion off of the General Meeting list and
onto the Legal Team list only?

Is that really the best choice? This issue seems to be cross functional
issue in that it concerns both the license list and the technical details of
representing license data in SPDX files (and in the license list itself). I
think both the legal and tech teams need to collaborate to solve this
problem. Relegating it into any single functional area list will, i fear,
hinder progress to a solution quite significantly.

Agreed. In this general forum we've heard that the existing SPDX
license list approach does not meet the needs of Linux distributions
(in the case I raised, OpenEmbedded) because it does not have the
flexibility to succinctly and accurately represent the current
licenses of many GPL packages like gcc and its libraries.

Missing a "BMKL" is one thing. Missing GPL-2.0+-with-GCC-exception
and other GPL variants in common use, and/or requiring all such
variants to be listed explicitly in the spec or named arbitrarily at
the discretion of independent compilers of SPDX files, seems to be a
more fundamental weakness in the technical description of licenses.
Resolution of this is likely to require fairly wide familiarity with
what packages should have supported license descriptions in
combination with legal insight on how to express their licenses.

Adding spdx-tech (which I've just done, and joined) and dropping
general (which I have not done), might make sense, recognizing that
this sort of fragmentation does make it more likely that issues will
not be discovered and resolved in a timely fashion.

Peter

On Fri Jun 29 07:04:27 2012, Philip Odence wrote:

Polite request:
Could we shift this discussion off of the General Meeting list and
onto the Legal Team list only?

Is that really the best choice? This issue seems to be cross functional issue in that it concerns both the license list and the technical details of representing license data in SPDX files (and in the license list itself). I think both the legal and tech teams need to collaborate to solve this problem. Relegating it into any single functional area list will, i fear, hinder progress to a solution quite significantly.

Peter
openlogic.com

From: Tom Incorvia <tom.incorvia@...>
Date: Thu, 28 Jun 2012 14:14:32 -0500
To: Bob Gobeille <bob.gobeille@...>, "Bradley M. Kuhn" <bkuhn@...>
Cc: SPDX-legal <spdx-legal@...>, <spdx@...>
Subject: RE: "Scope" of licenses to be covered by SPDX

As long as the licenses are

 

-          Carefully named and vetted for exact license text

 

-          Somewhat broadly applicable (“somewhat broadly” is fuzzy, but we do want the list to grow starting with very common and moving to less common – it is a way to get more value with our limited bandwidth to vet the licenses)

 

Then more is better.

 

SPDX is looking for volunteers to submit additional licenses that meet the above criteria.

 

To nominate a license, provide this info: http://spdx.org/wiki/spdx-license-list-process-requesting-new-licenses-be-added. 

 

Legal team: I can help with the reviews of proposed licenses, although I am not available until the end of July. 

 

Tom

 

Tom Incorvia

tom.incorvia@...

Direct: (512) 340-1336

 

 

Bradley,

See spec http://www.spdx.org/system/files/spdx-1.0.pdf on pages 23-24.

There's a section in an SPDX file called Other Licensing Information
Detected to handle licenses not on the standard list. The person creating
SPDX file creates an extension to the standard list that is local to the
particular SPDX file with similar short names. So, if you find the Bradley
Kuhn License you could designate it at BMKL-1.0, say, and then could use
that identifier throughout that SPDX file to reference that license. The
Other Licensing Information Detected section would map BMLK-1.0 to the
specific text of the license.

Hope that increases your comfort that the SPDX standard can handle-non
standard licenses. And, as others have pointed out, you could also submit
the BMKL to the SPDX legal team for future inclusion on the standard list.

Best,
Phil





Jilayne, I am not yet on the legal list, so please forward.

On 06/28/2012 01:10 PM, Bradley M. Kuhn wrote:

Other license lists aren't designed to allow for cataloging the details
of a Free Software release, nor are they meant to be grokked by
programs, so they don't need to be perfectly comprehensive. If a
license is missing from SPDX's list, I can't write an accurate SPDX file
for that package, right? Seems like a really big bug in SPDX to me

SPDX files don't require that the licenses they refer to be present in the "SPDX License List". The license that you find in a source file can be represented on its own in the SPDX file. The primary purpose of the license list is to provide consistent names for the commonly used licenses, provide standard texts and (eventually) provide a mechanism for automated matching of license text gathered from source files against these standard licenses.

--
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

On Jun 28, 2012, at 12:02 PM, Bradley M. Kuhn wrote:

But, note that exceptions are all over the place, in things like
Classpath, autoconf, and plenty of other places. I wonder: has anyone
taken a Fossology (the best scanning tool available as Free Software)
run of Debian distribution and just made sure every license it finds has
a moniker in SPDX? If not, why not? Seems like a necessary first step
for SPDX to have any chance of being complete.

FWIW, one of our FOSSology contributors (thank you Camille) put together a spreadsheet (HarmonisationLicenseIDs.ods) highlighting the differences between the fossology license list and the SPDX license list:

http://www.fossology.org/projects/fossology/wiki/MatchSPDXLicenceIDs

We plan on using this to update fossology with the SPDX license short names and insure we have license signatures for all the SPDX licenses.

Bob Gobeille
bobg@...

Jilayne Lovejoy wrote at 16:05 (EDT) on Wednesday:

Do you expect the SPDX License List to cover every license you find?

I'm not clear on what the value of SPDX's license list unless it's
comprehensive. Can you explain how SPDX is still useful if the licenses
for widely distributed and used central-infrastructure programs can't
be listed with SPDX?

Does any list?

Other license lists aren't designed to allow for cataloging the details
of a Free Software release, nor are they meant to be grokked by
programs, so they don't need to be perfectly comprehensive. If a
license is missing from SPDX's list, I can't write an accurate SPDX file
for that package, right? Seems like a really big bug in SPDX to me.

This is why I keep renewing my encouragement for the SPDX group to
actually *write* some SPDX files and carry them upstream. Your problems
with SPDX will start to shake out a lot faster if you do that.

Indeed, my offer that I've been making for a year remains open: when
I see that SPDX patch come across the BusyBox mailing list, I'll endorse
it and encourage Denys to put it upstream.... but I still haven't seen
the patch arrive, and when I suggest this to SPDX folks, they tell me
"upstream should be responsible for doing this work". I get worried any
time a bunch of proprietary software companies get together and start
suggesting unfunded mandates for upstream Free Software projects.
--
-- bkuhn

Jilayne Lovejoy wrote at 16:02 (EDT) on Wednesday:

So, if you have an idea as to how to implement this idea, while
keeping in mind the overall goal of the LIcense List, etc. - that
would be great!!

IMO, "implementing" is trivial. The tough part is careful cataloging to
know *what* to add to the list. For example, obviously, no one did the
work of cataloging the exceptions in GCC, which is why the license of
GCC can't be represented by SPDX for any version of GCC (See my other
post about that:
http://lists.spdx.org/pipermail/spdx/2012-June/000704.html )

If someone wants to do the work of cataloging the exceptions in GCC, I'd
be happy to advise, since I was involved with Brett Smith when he did
the work during the 3.1 RTL exception drafting process. Cc me on any
email threads that are working on this and I'll try to allocate time to
help.

But, note that exceptions are all over the place, in things like
Classpath, autoconf, and plenty of other places. I wonder: has anyone
taken a Fossology (the best scanning tool available as Free Software)
run of Debian distribution and just made sure every license it finds has
a moniker in SPDX? If not, why not? Seems like a necessary first step
for SPDX to have any chance of being complete.
--
-- bkuhn

On Wed, 2012-06-27 at 20:05 +0000, Jilayne Lovejoy wrote:

In any case, anyone can suggest adding a license via this process:

http://spdx.org/wiki/spdx-license-list-process-requesting-new-licenses-be
-added We are largely "under-staffed" and "under-paid," so I would
encourage anyone who wants to see the list expanded to get involved.

To chime in on this, at openSUSE we have exactly the problem described
above - we'd like to adopt SPDX, but the license list does not provide
anywhere need the coverage that we need. What we've done in the interim
is create a spreadsheet on Google Docs where we add those licenses we
need to track with a SUSE- prefix. We'd hope to push these (or
substitutes for those) upstream to the SPDX license list.

Do you expect the SPDX License List to cover every license you find? Does
any list?

No, of course not. There are simply too many licenses which almost
exactly correspond to existing, known licenses. It is the 'almost
exactly' that raises the issue. If all of these were to be included in a
list, the list would be very long indeed.

It would be great to align your list with the SPDX List (and make sure the
short identifiers are consistent, as the intent it to not changes those,
once they are published on the list) - please see the link above as to how
to add a license or join a legal call so we can figure out how best to
proceed.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/pub?key=0AqPp4y2wyQsbdGQ1V3pRRDg5NEpGVWpubzdRZ0tjUWc

The left column is the SPDX shortname (with a proprietary SUSE- before
it if the license is not on the SPDX list).

In response to another idea on this list, I also think it makes sense to
use operators like + and - instead of basic strings for license
shortnames. It is certainly not consistent that the list contains e.g.
GPL-2.0-with-openssl-exception but not GPL-2.0+-with-openssl-exception.
Rather than coming up with n- strings for all those licenses out there,
surely using an operator would make more sense.

Just posted a response to the original response on this.

In summary, the SPDX format (well, for us as a linux distribution, the
SPDX shortnames) looks like it could help provide considerable
consistency, but (and this is a huge but) it is currently unusable for
linux distributions.

What makes it "unusable" - I'm not sure I completely understand.

If we are referring only to the shortnames (typically, this - or a
combination of these - would be what would be included in the spec file)
then we would not get far if we limited ourselves only to packages with
licenses on the spdx list. Our current workaround, as stated above, is
to use a proprietary SUSE- prefix and to come up with a SPDX-like
shortname.

Ciaran

- Jilayne

In any case, anyone can suggest adding a license via this process:

http://spdx.org/wiki/spdx-license-list-process-requesting-new-licenses-be
-added We are largely "under-staffed" and "under-paid," so I would
encourage anyone who wants to see the list expanded to get involved.

To chime in on this, at openSUSE we have exactly the problem described
above - we'd like to adopt SPDX, but the license list does not provide
anywhere need the coverage that we need. What we've done in the interim
is create a spreadsheet on Google Docs where we add those licenses we
need to track with a SUSE- prefix. We'd hope to push these (or
substitutes for those) upstream to the SPDX license list.

Do you expect the SPDX License List to cover every license you find? Does
any list?
It would be great to align your list with the SPDX List (and make sure the
short identifiers are consistent, as the intent it to not changes those,
once they are published on the list) - please see the link above as to how
to add a license or join a legal call so we can figure out how best to
proceed.

In response to another idea on this list, I also think it makes sense to
use operators like + and - instead of basic strings for license
shortnames. It is certainly not consistent that the list contains e.g.
GPL-2.0-with-openssl-exception but not GPL-2.0+-with-openssl-exception.
Rather than coming up with n- strings for all those licenses out there,
surely using an operator would make more sense.

Just posted a response to the original response on this.

In summary, the SPDX format (well, for us as a linux distribution, the
SPDX shortnames) looks like it could help provide considerable
consistency, but (and this is a huge but) it is currently unusable for
linux distributions.

What makes it "unusable" - I'm not sure I completely understand.

- Jilayne