1. spdx@lists.spdx.org
  2. Messages
   Date   
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@...

CONFIDENTIALITY NOTICE
This email may contain confidential or privileged information.  If you are not the intended recipient or the person responsible for delivering the message to the intended recipient, then please notify us by return e-mail immediately.  If you have received this e-mail in error, do not copy this e-mail for any purpose nor disclose its contents to any other person.
Compilation of SPDX tools

Marc-Etienne Vargenau
 

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

RUFFIN MICHEL
 

So Bradley, 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. I have join the FSFE legal network and I tried to get a reaction without success except "that's interesting". Any suggestion of organization that would have a look?

It took us a lot of manpower to define FOSs clause which are widely accepted and tremendous effort to negotiate them with various suppliers before reaching this state. And if not standardize we can expect again more efforts

That's important because we are trying to standardize as much as we can of our FOSS governance process (for instance having an "open source" database describing iPR issues so the effort done by each company today will be shared and copyright owners can have their own word for correcting information interpretation. I think this will be the benefit of everybody: copyright owners, open source communities, proprietary software vendors, FOSS distributor companies.

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 : spdx-bounces@... [mailto:spdx-bounces@...] De la part de Bradley M. Kuhn
Envoyé : jeudi 14 juin 2012 16:39
À : spdx@...
Cc : spdx-tech@...
Objet : Re: Clarification regarding "FSF legal network" (was Re: Import and export function of SPDX)

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.

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.

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 :).

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.)

(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).

I should have posted these concerns sooner to this mailing list, but I
hadn't thought to do so since I'd already explained the concerns privately
to so many of you before.

-- bkuhn
_______________________________________________
Spdx mailing list
Spdx@...
https://lists.spdx.org/mailman/listinfo/spdx
Re: Clarification regarding "FSF legal network" (was Re: Import and export function of SPDX)

Bradley M. Kuhn <bkuhn@...>
 

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.

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.

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 :).

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.)

(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).

I should have posted these concerns sooner to this mailing list, but I
hadn't thought to do so since I'd already explained the concerns privately
to so many of you before.

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

RUFFIN MICHEL
 

You are right it is FTFE legal network.
If I provided our FOSS clause to SPDX it was illustrate the use case, I know that the discussion on this subject should be in FTFE mailing list.

By the way with the discussion in SPDX, I am now convinced that we need to add these two fields to our database. However to cope with legacy the import/export function might provide a solution when these field are blank

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 : spdx-bounces@... [mailto:spdx-bounces@...] De la part de Bradley M. Kuhn
Envoyé : mercredi 13 juin 2012 22:07
À : Jilayne Lovejoy
Cc : spdx-tech@...; spdx@...
Objet : Clarification regarding "FSF legal network" (was Re: Import and export function of SPDX)

Jilayne Lovejoy wrote:

In regards to your posting...to... the FSF legal network
Just for clarification: the FSF doesn't have a legal network, to my
knowledge.

I believe you are likely referring to the highly secretive entity called
FTFE-legal, which appears to have some (albeit unclear) affiliation with a
different organization called FSF Europe. While I am indeed unclear on what
FTFE-legal's relationship to FSF Europe is, I am quite sure FTFE-legal has no
affiliation with FSF whatsoever.

Nevertheless, please do feel free to correct me if I have any of those facts
wrong. That's my understanding, having discussed this issue extensively with
FSF leadership.

-- bkuhn
_______________________________________________
Spdx mailing list
Spdx@...
https://lists.spdx.org/mailman/listinfo/spdx
Thursday SPDX General Meeting Reminder

Philip Odence
 

I am on vacation. Kate will fill in for me. 

Meeting Time: June14, 8am PST / 10 am CST / 11am EST / 15:00 UTC. http://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/converter.html

Conf call dial-in:
Conference code:  7812589502
Toll-free dial-in number (U.S. and Canada):  (877) 435-0230
International dial-in number: (253) 336-6732
For those dialing in from other regions, a list of toll free numbers can be found: https://www.intercallonline.com/portlets/scheduling/viewNumbers/viewNumber.do?ownerNumber=6053870&audioType=RP&viewGa=false&ga=OFF

 
Administrative Agenda
Attendance
Approve minutes: 

Technical Team Report - Kate
Legal Team Report - Jilayne
Business Team Report – Jack Manbeck/Scott Lamons

Cross Functional Issues
Website Update – Steve Cropper

981 - 1000 of 1642