THE SPDX WIKI IS NO LONGER ACTIVE. ALL CONTENT HAS BEEN MOVED TO https://github.com/spdx

General Meeting/Minutes/2013-04-CollabSummit

From SPDX Wiki
Jump to: navigation, search

COLLABORATION SUMMIT SUMMARY

For those of you who didn’t make it to the Collaboration Summit, below is a summary of the different components of the event. It was pretty inspiring in a number of ways…for me, it felt like the rubber is finally meeting the road seeing real tools—our own, from academia, and commercial—putting out real live SPDX docs. The every positive KarenC summed it up as “The discussions have much more of a feeling that this has to happen – the only questions are around how.” And I agree.

All the team leads did an outstanding job organizing our ever expanding involvement in Linux event. (Now we even get our own track.) Gary, MarkG and Adam were also key in pulling this off.

Tech Team Working Session

In this session we went through the current model proposal for 2.0, and discussed options that would simplify the model, and still meet the use cases we're targeting. We were also able to start off the relationship and element usage enumerations. Full details can be found at: Technical_Team/Minutes/2013-04-16.

Legal Team Working Session

The SPDX Legal Team met at the LF Collab Summit to hash out the remaining bits of the License Matching guidelines. Namely whether SPDX should provide "guidelines only" in regards to what is to be considered substantive text of a license for matching purposes or whether SPDX should go further and provide some kind of actual markup or examples in regards to text than can be ignored or considered "replaceable" for matching purposes. And, if the latter, to what extent and in what format to provide such markup or examples. The legal team, with good representation from various tool makers and tech team members, decided that markup was needed to avoid potential differences in interpretation by tool makers. It was decided to use simple markup that could be illustrated within a .txt file, as that is the (mostly) preferred download format for the licenses. The exact details of the markup are being worked out and the Legal Team (with help from anyone else in the SPDX Workgroup) will manage getting the markup created for the entire current SPDX License List.

Open SPDX Discussion

Mark Gisi from Windriver and Adam Cohn from Cisco held this session on Tuesday afternoon. It was held under Chatham House Rules which means “When a meeting, or part thereof, is held under the Chatham House Rule, participants are free to use the information received, but neither the identity nor the affiliation of the speaker(s), nor that of any other participant, may be revealed.”. Now before you say hey you just said you weren’t supposed to mention names, these two were the chairs as listed on the SPDX schedule.There was a lot of good discussion. One individual talked about how they are fully integrating SPDX into what they their company delivers and how they are shipping, and I believe the number was, over 500 SPDX documents with each release. They also had a website for generating SPDX documents. Others talked about how they have started to integrate SPDX into their compliance process using it for reviews but not yet quite shipping. The reasons seemed to vary for that but they appeared to be more procedural than SPDX related. One individual did raise a concern on the amount of time that it might take to generate SPDX documents adding that it increased the cost of their compliance it was not something they could do. A few individuals talked about the adoption of SPDX among open source projects. There was some discussion on how this could be done now as there are a few open source tools that have appeared to generate SPDX documents. One individual talked about how they would like to see SPDX become more fully integrated into the community meaning that practices normally associated with an open source project such as peer review and so forth were used and considered part of the process of generating, reviewing and editing SPDX documents.

SPDX Morning Sessions

Mark Gisi (the man that Scott calls “the spiritual leader of SPDX adoption”) kicked off the morning with License to Kill…You Code, a very cogent treatise on why it’s important for copyright holders to get it right if they want their projects to thrive. Then Gary “the Toolman” O’Neall lead a panel on Tooling up for SPDX. He gave an over view of group, community and commercial tools that are now compatible with SPDX. Gary was joined by Matt Germonprez of the University of Nebraska Omaha and Sameer Ahmed from Wind River Systems who both talked in some detail about work their groups have done to “tool up.” Conclusion: This stuff is real! And to prove it…

SPDX Bakeoff

The SPDX Bakeoff was held Wednesday afternoon. Our main objective was to compare SPDX output from different tools in order to identify bugs and resolve different interpretations of the specification. We had great representation from the various tool providers, members of the SPDX working group, and a number of other interested parties. Gary O’Neall’s excellent spreadsheet comparison tool was used as the basis for comparison of the various SPDX files. Per the agenda, we first stepped through the complete Time package on a file by file basis. Following that we dove into Busybox but only at the package level. There was a lot good discussion and yes we did find some bugs in the tools and areas where the specification needs to be improved. All in all it was a very productive session and should serve to advance the adoption of SPDX. The spreadsheet along with notes from the session are captured on in this Google doc folder: https://drive.google.com/?tab=mo&authuser=0#folders/0BxKdX878M2HCTlZIbkZSMXN6SGc