[ adding Debian relevant people for DEP5 & preserving all extra needed
Cc:-s mentioned in the thread thus far (I hope :)) ]

On Wed, May 25, 2011 at 01:35:01PM +0200, Ciaran Farrell wrote:

We saw that there is a variety of ways in which distributions describe the
license of a package (or a component of a package) - where the distributions
actually mean the same license but have different designations (short names)
for their package metadata.

Whereas we didn't actually conclusively decide on anything, we did agree that
it would be beneficial if the distributions would adopt a common scheme of
designating license names.

Agreed, of course.

Currently, one example of an online collaborative effort (under the auspices
of the Linux Foundation) is SPDX (spdx.org) (which has been adopted by Debian
in DEP5).

A small clarification is needed here. Actually DEP5 predates SPDX
(although it took quite a while to complete...). A handy link to DEP5 is
<http://dep.debian.net/deps/dep5/>. In the current state, DEP5 has not
explicitly adopted SPDX, although we have tried to stay as close as
possible to it. There are still some difference though, which you can
find listed at
<http://wiki.debian.org/Proposals/CopyrightFormat#Differences_between_DEP5_and_SPDX>
together with some of the actions we've taken wrt those differences.

I've not been personally involved in the standardization of DEP5 in
Debian, but Lars Wirzenius and Steve Langasek have been and I'm adding
them in the loop. I'm sure they can provide way more precise information
about all this than me.

Cheers.
--
Stefano Zacchiroli -o- PhD in Computer Science \ PostDoc @ Univ. Paris 7
zack@{upsilon.cc,pps.jussieu.fr,debian.org} -<>- http://upsilon.cc/zack/
Quando anche i santi ti voltano le spalle, | . |. I've fans everywhere
ti resta John Fante -- V. Capossela .......| ..: |.......... -- C. Adams