Phil and all, I know the SPDX mailing list is not the best mailing list to do this request but I would like to launch a new initiative on FOSS governance standardisation, can someone tell me what is the best way for that ?

ALU since 3 years is putting in all its contracts with its suppliers (FOSS distributors or proprietary software vendor) some clauses relative to FOSS. We would like to standardize this so we will spend much less time in negotiations of contracts and it will become a common practice (note that we start to receive similar conditions from our customers).

The text is short there is only 5 clauses + a definition of what is FOSS but the amount of work beyond that is important because the legal text of our clauses has evolved a lot and been clarified over time with the experience of negotiations. Specially having a good definition of FOSS easy to accept by other companies has been challenging. See the definition bellow.

The clauses are not fancy and are being accepted more and more easily by our suppliers (and we have hundred of them). Quickly  they say

1)       we need to get the list of FOSS and their license coming with the product (on SPDX standard if possible in the future)

2)       the supplier is in compliance with FOSS licenses and if there is contradiction between the contract (between us and the supplier) and FOSS license, we can apply the FOSS license conditions

3)       if FOSS license request source code availability we can get it

4)       We need to have packaging information: e.g. what information we need to put in our documentation to respect FOSS license

5)       Under which license the software is licensed to us (some licenses such as MIT or BSD allow sublicensing, while GPL or LGPL do not). For instance the supplier can deliver to us a FOSS under MIT license but which is relicensed to us according to the supplier terms and conditions. So we need a clear statement on this.

We have prepared a document to share with FOSSBazaar providing the legal text + a rational for each clause and our lawyers are oK to share this document. We are ready of course to explain things at length.

Michel

“Free and/or Open Source Software” or “FOSS” means (i) software provided to Licensor royalty-free in source code form, under a license including, but not limited to, one approved by the Open Source Initiative (OSI http://www.opensource.org/) or (ii) proprietary software provided to Licensor royalty-free in binary code form, under an end user license agreement that is accepted without a signature, or (iii) shareware provided to Licensor free of initial charge, such as on a trial basis, but where a fee may become due once the user decides to use the software beyond the trial period, or (iv) public domain software