"Scope" of licenses to be covered by SPDX


Kevin P. Fleming <kpfleming@...>
 

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


Tom Incorvia
 

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

 

 

-----Original Message-----
From: spdx-legal-bounces@... [mailto:spdx-legal-bounces@...] On Behalf Of Bob Gobeille
Sent: Thursday, June 28, 2012 1:50 PM
To: Bradley M. Kuhn
Cc: SPDX-legal; spdx@...
Subject: Re: "Scope" of licenses to be covered by SPDX

 

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@...

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Philip Odence
 

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 6/28/12 2:10 PM, "Bradley M. Kuhn" <bkuhn@...> wrote:

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
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Philip Odence
 

Polite request:
Could we shift this discussion off of the General Meeting list and onto the Legal Team list only? TThis is GREAT discussion for the legal team.
This is not a big problem, but I want to respect the norms we established when we formed the Legal, Business and Tech teams. Part of splitting up the lists was to keep the traffic on the General Meeting list light so as not to burden folks who are only looking to monitor goings across the teams and at a high level. Real work (and this is real work) is supposed to be done on the team lists. 
So, if anyone responds to this (or other emails in the thread) please remove spdx@... from the CC.
Note: anyone not on the legal list and wanting to follow the discussion can sign up at http://lists.spdx.org/mailman/listinfo/spdx-legal
Thanks,
Phil

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

 

 

-----Original Message-----
From: spdx-legal-bounces@... [mailto:spdx-legal-bounces@...] On Behalf Of Bob Gobeille
Sent: Thursday, June 28, 2012 1:50 PM
To: Bradley M. Kuhn
Cc: SPDX-legal; spdx@...
Subject: Re: "Scope" of licenses to be covered by SPDX

 

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@...

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Spdx-legal mailing list

Spdx-legal@...

https://lists.spdx.org/mailman/listinfo/spdx-legal

 

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Peter Williams <peter.williams@...>
 

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


Peter A. Bigot
 

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


Jilayne Lovejoy <jilayne.lovejoy@...>
 

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

- Jilayne

On 6/28/12 12:02 PM, "Bradley M. Kuhn" <bkuhn@...> wrote:

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
_______________________________________________
Spdx mailing list
Spdx@...
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