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SPDX RDF Sub-group Mtg 7
(TODAY) Tuesday October 19, 11AM eastern time

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Today's requested agenda items:

1) rdfa/xhtml example - Peter (15 min)

2) Formal proposal to leverage other vocabularies - Gary (15 min)

3) SHA1 usage - Gary (15 min)

Today's call dial-in details:

SPDX RDF Sub-group Mtg 6
(TODAY) Tuesday October 12, 11AM eastern time

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Bill Schineller
Knowledge Base Manager
Black Duck Software Inc.
T: +1.781.810.1829
F: +1.781.891.5145
E: bschineller@...
http://www.blackducksoftware.com

Today's call dial-in details:
(I understand Kate is unavailable)

SPDX RDF Sub-group Mtg 5
(TODAY) Tuesday October 5, 11AM eastern time

Toll-free dial-in number (U.S. and Canada): (877) 435-0230
International dial-in number: (253) 336-6732
Conference code: 7833942033

URL to join meeting:
http://blackducksoftware.na6.acrobat.com/r55067356/


Bill Schineller
Knowledge Base Manager
Black Duck Software Inc.
T: +1.781.810.1829
F: +1.781.891.5145
E: bschineller@...
http://www.blackducksoftware.com

On 10/2/10 4:39 AM, Philippe Ombredanne wrote:

the idea is good, though we should not reinvent a license templates
syntax when the OSI has alreday done something.
They use angle brackets so I would suggest using the same, not square
brackets. See http://www.opensource.org/licenses/bsd-license.php for
instance.

I was unaware that OSI has a pattern for this already. I agree we should follow the pattern they have used.

Another note is that copyright notices (such as in the BSD example you
provide) may or may not be part of the license.
I consider them part of the license when the license text itself is
copyrighted explicitly (GPL, Apache).
In the case of a BSD, I would not consider the copyright notice to be
explicitly part of the license, and therefore likely not needed in a
templatized license.

That is an excellent point. it seems reasonable to treat the copyright declarations that are usually associated with the BSD license as not really part of the license. Could those of you with a legal background comment on this?

Peter Williams
<http://openlogic.com>

* Armijn Hemel <armijn@...> [2010-09-29 20:31]:

But, to actually make it a question: is there an archive available of
the period before August 10?

We used a different mailing list (called package-facts) in the past
and decided not to open up those archives to the public since it was a
closed list. However, if you subscribe to the package-facts list I
will approve you and then you can access the archives.
--
Martin Michlmayr
Open Source Program Office, Hewlett-Packard

On 2010-09-30 18:52, Peter Williams wrote:

In <https://fossbazaar.org/pipermail/spdx/2010-September/000116.html>
dmg brought up and interesting question regarding how similar two
license texts need to be before they can be considered the same license.
This got me thinking about the proposed license templates.

I am increasing uncomfortable with the idea of spdx specify a mechanism
intended to support recognition of licenses. That very idea seems
fraught with peril, both technically and legally.

What constitutes similar enough to treat as a single license is a policy
decision. Risk averse organizations with a high profile might choose a
relatively high bar for sameness, while less risk averse organizations
will probably prefer a lower bar. I think setting these policies should
be left to the producers and consumers of spdx files. These parties are
the only ones with enough information to do it effectively.

There are a few situations where a light weight template syntax in the
license text field itself would be useful. Such a syntax would allow a
way to demarcate really obvious and uncontentious replaceable parts of
the license. Square brackets around a description of the replaceable
element would probably sufficient.

Peter:
my 2 cents:

the idea is good, though we should not reinvent a license templates syntax when the OSI has alreday done something.
They use angle brackets so I would suggest using the same, not square brackets. See http://www.opensource.org/licenses/bsd-license.php for instance.

Another note is that copyright notices (such as in the BSD example you provide) may or may not be part of the license.
I consider them part of the license when the license text itself is copyrighted explicitly (GPL, Apache).
In the case of a BSD, I would not consider the copyright notice to be explicitly part of the license, and therefore likely not needed in a templatized license.

For example, the 3 clause bsd license
text would look like this

Copyright (c) [YEAR], [OWNER]
All rights reserved.

Redistribution and use in source and binary forms, with or without
modification, are permitted provided that the following conditions
are met:

* Redistributions of source code must retain the above copyright
notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer.
* Redistributions in binary form must reproduce the above
copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following
disclaimer in the documentation and/or other materials
provided with the distribution.
* Neither the name of the [ORGANIZATION] nor the names of its
contributors may be used to endorse or promote products
derived from this software without specific prior written
permission.

THIS SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED BY THE COPYRIGHT HOLDERS AND CONTRIBUTORS
"AS IS" AND ANY EXPRESS OR IMPLIED WARRANTIES, INCLUDING, BUT NOT
LIMITED TO, THE IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY AND FITNESS
FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE ARE DISCLAIMED. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE
COPYRIGHT HOLDER OR CONTRIBUTORS BE LIABLE FOR ANY DIRECT, INDIRECT,
INCIDENTAL, SPECIAL, EXEMPLARY, OR CONSEQUENTIAL DAMAGES (INCLUDING,
BUT NOT LIMITED TO, PROCUREMENT OF SUBSTITUTE GOODS OR SERVICES;
LOSS OF USE, DATA, OR PROFITS; OR BUSINESS INTERRUPTION) HOWEVER
CAUSED AND ON ANY THEORY OF LIABILITY, WHETHER IN CONTRACT, STRICT
LIABILITY, OR TORT (INCLUDING NEGLIGENCE OR OTHERWISE) ARISING IN
ANY WAY OUT OF THE USE OF THIS SOFTWARE, EVEN IF ADVISED OF THE
POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGE.

This would allow spdx to provide canonical forms of licenses without
trying to specify policy issues.

Peter Williams
<http://openlogic.com>



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--
Cordially
Philippe

philippe ombredanne | 1 650 799 0949 | pombredanne at nexb.com
nexB - Open by Design (tm) - http://www.nexb.com

On 9/30/10 2:54 PM, dmg wrote:

PErhaps the solution is to have a judgement field, that indicates if
the license is matched perfectly, or a decision was made.

I also think it would be very useful to extract the license statement
of file, and save it. As tools get better then can concentrate on the
analysis of such,k particular for the extraction of copyright
information.

A judgment is always made. Even if the file says "licensed under the terms of the BSD License", you have to decide if you believe that or if you believe they copied the file from a GPL licensed project and stripped the original license header.

Peter
<http://openlogic.com>

On Thu, Sep 30, 2010 at 1:45 PM, dmg<dmg@...> wrote:

Two more things about the zlib example:

1. The license of the ada subdirectory is GPLv2+ not, GPLv2.

2. There is another interesting example, which is labelled BSD-3 in
the SPDX. Same issues regarding this than the variability of the zlib
license apply here.

/*
* match.S -- optimized version of longest_match()
* based on the similar work by Gilles Vollant, and Brian Raiter, written 1998
*
* This is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it
* under the terms of the BSD License. Use by owners of Che Guevarra
* parafernalia is prohibited, where possible, and highly discouraged
* elsewhere.
*/

On Wed, Sep 29, 2010 at 1:32 PM, dmg<dmg@...> wrote:

This is good. It can start some discussion on the standard.

First, one question:

I scanned the file for zlib and I found some issues with it, but I
think are worth discussing:

1. Some files do not contain a license, yet they are marked as one:

dmg@i:/tmp/zlib-1.2.5$ more contrib/minizip/zip.c
/* zip.c -- IO on .zip files using zlib
Version 1.1, February 14h, 2010
part of the MiniZip project - (
http://www.winimage.com/zLibDll/minizip.html )

Copyright (C) 1998-2010 Gilles Vollant (minizip) (
http://www.winimage.com/zLibDll/minizip.html )

Modifications for Zip64 support
Copyright (C) 2009-2010 Mathias Svensson ( http://result42.com )

For more info read MiniZip_info.txt

Changes
Oct-2009 - Mathias Svensson - Remove old C style function prototypes
Oct-2009 - Mathias Svensson - Added Zip64 Support when creating new
file archives
Oct-2009 - Mathias Svensson - Did some code cleanup and refactoring
to get better overview of some functions.
Oct-2009 - Mathias Svensson - Added zipRemoveExtraInfoBlock to
strip extra field data from its ZIP64 data
It is used when recreting zip archive
with RAW when deleting items from a zip.
ZIP64 data is automaticly added to
items that needs it, and existing ZIP64 data need to be removed.
Oct-2009 - Mathias Svensson - Added support for BZIP2 as
compression mode (bzip2 lib is required)
Jan-2010 - back to unzip and minizip 1.0 name scheme, with
compatibility layer

*/


------------
2. Some files refer to zlib.h as the file with a license. Now, if the
SHA1 of the file does not change, I would presume (as a user) that I
don't need to scan it again, which is good. But what if zlib.h
changes? Would it be useful in the SPDX to
use a "reference" field to denote such a thing?

---------
3. Is it the same to include a license than to refer to a license?

---
4. In some files the zlib iicense varies slightly:


This software is provided 'as-is', without any express or implied
warranty. In no event will the author be held liable for any damages
arising from the use of this software.

and in others

This software is provided 'as-is', without any express or implied
warranty. In no event will the authors be held liable for any damages
arising from the use of this software.

--dmg


On Wed, Sep 29, 2010 at 12:52 PM, Philip Odence
<podence@...> wrote:

I moved it to
Home » Wiki » Software Package Data Exchange (SPDX) » Spec
Development » Sandbox For Sharing Examples, Ideas, Etc.
Not sure if it way my knowledge or permissions or both, but anyway, it's
there.
Good stuff, Peter.



On Sep 29, 2010, at 3:45 PM, Peter Williams wrote:

Hi all,

I have posted some examples, along with some notes about them at
<http://spdx.org/wiki/openlogic-spdx-10-beta-examples>. The examples
are intended to conform to the 1.0 beta version of the spec except that
we used sha-256 checksums -- rather than sha-1 -- to identify the files.

I was not able to figure out how to add that page to the examples
sandbox. (Perhaps i do not permission to do that? ) Would someone
with more knowledge of (or permissions with) the wiki do that for me?

Comments and feedback are welcome.

Peter Williams
<http://openlogic.com>
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--
--dmg

---
Daniel M. German
http://turingmachine.org

--
--dmg

---
Daniel M. German
http://turingmachine.org

PErhaps the solution is to have a judgement field, that indicates if
the license is matched perfectly, or a decision was made.

I also think it would be very useful to extract the license statement
of file, and save it. As tools get better then can concentrate on the
analysis of such,k particular for the extraction of copyright
information.

--
--dmg

---
Daniel M. German
http://turingmachine.org

Two more things about the zlib example:

1. The license of the ada subdirectory is GPLv2+ not, GPLv2.

2. There is another interesting example, which is labelled BSD-3 in
the SPDX. Same issues regarding this than the variability of the zlib
license apply here.

/*
* match.S -- optimized version of longest_match()
* based on the similar work by Gilles Vollant, and Brian Raiter, written 1998
*
* This is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it
* under the terms of the BSD License. Use by owners of Che Guevarra
* parafernalia is prohibited, where possible, and highly discouraged
* elsewhere.
*/

--
--dmg

---
Daniel M. German
http://turingmachine.org

In my opinion, the problem with allowing "user judgement" in included
license variability can lead to disagreements of what a license really
is, or even worse, misunderstanding of what the license of a file is.

Say hypothetically, you read a license and for you it is zlib, and for
me it is not, and I prefer to refer to it as a zlib-variant, because
for me the differences are strong enough to worry.

I would prefer that there was a single place at the beginning of the
SPDX file where such two variants of the license are located, and then
I can look at it and decide if it is equal or not. Rather than
trusting your judgement.

Perhaps I am just beating a dead horse, and nobody really cares about
such differences (think MIT/X11 and BSD-variants not this zlib
example).

--dmg

On Thu, Sep 30, 2010 at 1:19 PM, Peter Williams
<peter.williams@...> wrote:

3. Even thought there is no perfect textual comparison of the license
(aside from whitespace) the licenses have been considered to be
equivalent.

This is the only sane thing to do.  Unfortunately, there are situations in
which reasonable people could disagree about whether two license texts are
really the same license or not.

These are very good reasons why standardizing text of licenses by
inclusion seems to me like a bad idea.

Here i disagree.  I think standardizing some license texts is a Good Thing.
 No one will be force to reference those standard licenses.  If you find a
license that you believe is materially different from the all the texts in
the public repo that license can be included in the spdx file as a
non-standard license.  Having a set of licenses with standardized names
allows much more efficient communication and greater interoperability.

--
--dmg

---
Daniel M. German
http://turingmachine.org

On 9/30/10 11:57 AM, dmg wrote:

Thanks Peter for your clarifications.

I think this shows, that the ones creating the files will be _making_
decisions.

I completely agree. I think anyone that has actual tried to analyze a package for copyright/license info knows that a lot of judgment calls are required.

In this case, several have been made:

1. Files without a license share the license of the project
2. If a file A specifies that its license is in B, then license(A) == license(B)

I would say that as license(A) = license-specified-by(B). For example, the text of GPL v3, <http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html>, is licensed under terms quite different from GPL. So if license(A) -> B where B is a file containing just the text of the GPL then license(A) = GPL but license(B) = "Everyone is permitted to copy and distribute verbatim copies of this license document, but changing it is not allowed."

3. Even thought there is no perfect textual comparison of the license
(aside from whitespace) the licenses have been considered to be
equivalent.

This is the only sane thing to do. Unfortunately, there are situations in which reasonable people could disagree about whether two license texts are really the same license or not.

These are very good reasons why standardizing text of licenses by
inclusion seems to me like a bad idea.

Here i disagree. I think standardizing some license texts is a Good Thing. No one will be force to reference those standard licenses. If you find a license that you believe is materially different from the all the texts in the public repo that license can be included in the spdx file as a non-standard license. Having a set of licenses with standardized names allows much more efficient communication and greater interoperability.

The standard should be updated to allow the license text to be included in all situations. Even for standard licenses. That way an spdx producer could include the variations found, even if the producer considers them materially the same.

Peter

---dmg

On Thu, Sep 30, 2010 at 9:06 AM, Peter Williams
<peter.williams@...> wrote:

On 9/29/10 2:32 PM, dmg wrote:

This is good. It can start some discussion on the standard.

First, one question:

I scanned the file for zlib and I found some issues with it, but I
think are worth discussing:

1. Some files do not contain a license, yet they are marked as one:

We assume any that file that does not contain explicit license info and does
not match any of the open source in our database is licensed under the
declared license of the project. In this case the Zlib license.

2. Some files refer to zlib.h as the file with a license. Now, if the
SHA1 of the file does not change, I would presume (as a user) that I
don't need to scan it again, which is good. But what if zlib.h
changes? Would it be useful in the SPDX to
use a "reference" field to denote such a thing?

I think this is outside the scope of the spdx proper. Many of the decisions
about what licenses govern a file will be made on criteria other than an
explicit license declaration, direct or indirect. For example, some part of
a file might be matched against a database of open source and that open
source file might have a license associated with it.

In the short term this could be handled as comment on the file object. It
might be an interesting follow on project to create an extension to allow
expressing the decision criteria for why a particular license was chosen.

3. Is it the same to include a license than to refer to a license?

We treat those the same. This is a policy issue to be worked out between
the producer and the consumers of the spdx file. I think the spec should
avoid specify the copyright/license analysis process. Spdx should just
provide a way to express the results of such an analysis.

4. In some files the zlib iicense varies slightly:


This software is provided 'as-is', without any express or implied
warranty. In no event will the author be held liable for any damages
arising from the use of this software.

and in others

This software is provided 'as-is', without any express or implied
warranty. In no event will the authors be held liable for any damages
arising from the use of this software.

This also feels like a policy issue to me. We treat those as the same.

Peter Williams
<http://openlogic.com>
_______________________________________________
Spdx mailing list
Spdx@...
https://fossbazaar.org/mailman/listinfo/spdx

Thanks Peter for your clarifications.

I think this shows, that the ones creating the files will be _making_
decisions. In this case, several have been made:

1. Files without a license share the license of the project
2. If a file A specifies that its license is in B, then license(A) == license(B)
3. Even thought there is no perfect textual comparison of the license
(aside from whitespace) the licenses have been considered to be
equivalent.

These are very good reasons why standardizing text of licenses by
inclusion seems to me like a bad idea.

---dmg

On Thu, Sep 30, 2010 at 9:06 AM, Peter Williams
<peter.williams@...> wrote:

On 9/29/10 2:32 PM, dmg wrote:

This is good. It can start some discussion on the standard.

First, one question:

I scanned the file for zlib and I found some issues with it, but I
think are worth discussing:

1.  Some files do not contain a license, yet they are marked as one:

We assume any that file that does not contain explicit license info and does
not match any of the open source in our database is licensed under the
declared license of the project.  In this case the Zlib license.

2. Some files refer to zlib.h as the file with a license. Now, if the
SHA1 of the file does not change, I would presume (as a user) that I
don't need to scan it again, which is good. But what if zlib.h
changes? Would it be useful in the SPDX to
use a "reference" field to denote such a thing?

I think this is outside the scope of the spdx proper.  Many of the decisions
about what licenses govern a file will be made on criteria other than an
explicit license declaration, direct or indirect.  For example, some part of
a file might be matched against a database of open source and that open
source file might have a license associated with it.

In the short term this could be handled as comment on the file object. It
might be an interesting follow on project to create an extension to allow
expressing the decision criteria for why a particular license was chosen.

3. Is it the same to include a license than to refer to a license?

We treat those the same.  This is a policy issue to be worked out between
the producer and the consumers of the spdx file.  I think the spec should
avoid specify the copyright/license analysis process.  Spdx should just
provide a way to express the results of such an analysis.

4. In some files the zlib iicense varies slightly:


  This software is provided 'as-is', without any express or implied
  warranty.  In no event will the author be held liable for any damages
  arising from the use of this software.

and in others

  This software is provided 'as-is', without any express or implied
  warranty.  In no event will the authors be held liable for any damages
  arising from the use of this software.

This also feels like a policy issue to me.  We treat those as the same.

Peter Williams
<http://openlogic.com>
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Spdx mailing list
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--
--dmg

---
Daniel M. German
http://turingmachine.org