Difference between revisions of "Legal Team/Minutes/2016-03-03"

Revision as of 19:37, 3 March 2016

Attendees

• Paul Madick
• Dennis Clark
• Eric Weddington
• Alan Tse
• Kyle Mitchell
• Mark Gisi
• Brad Edmundton
• Kate Stewart
• Kris Reeves
• Jilayne Lovejoy

Agenda

1) New license requests: Considering it is already March, we will begin with the two new license requests, to be sure they can be resolved and added for the Q1 release at the end of the month. Please see: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/11AKxLBoN_VXM32OmDTk2hKeYExKzsnPjAVM7rLstQ8s/edit?pli=1#gid=695212681

• Free Art License 1.3 - approved for 2.4
  • discussed challenge of licenses with different translations and matching - should we have different translations of a license as separate licenses or just the "canonical" language and then other translations would be treated as a match? what if the license steward doesn't identify the canonical language?
  • current status on license list regarding licenses that have non-English translations (that we know of):
    • CECILL licenses are included as separate licenses, which reflects how they are presented by license steward
    • EUPL is listed in English with link (in Notes field) to list of other translations; EUPL-1.1 has clause stating that "All linguistic versions of this Licence, approved by the European Commission, have identical value. Parties can take advantage of the linguistic version of their choice." --> Thus, treating translations as equivalent seems like the right choice (although we currently don't have a mechanism for matching to this end)
    • D-FSL-1.0 is listed in German with link to English translation. The license includes a clause (in English) stating: "This License is written in German and English. Both versions are equally binding. It is assumed that terminology used in the License has the same meaning in both versions. Should, however, differences arise, such meaning is authoritative which best brings into line both versions, taking into consideration the aim and purpose of the License." --> Thus, also in this case, treating translations as equivalent seems like the right choice (although we currently don't have a mechanism for matching to this end)
  • more discussion of which way this license should go: Dennis' French language skills leads him to believe they are different licenses and we should add all versions as separate items, perhaps using essentially same identifier with a language differentiator at the end of the identifier
  • worst case scenario could/would be if different licenses taken to court in different languages could be interpreted to have different meanings - this would also cut towards having 7 different licenses; Court would have to honor clause in license that defined prevailing interpretation v. if it just said this on website, we don't know if judge would honor that in the same way as if it was drafted that way. on other hand, courts can come up with different interpretations of same license in same language anyway!
  • ACTION ITEM: Jilayne to reach out to license authors to ask their thoughts and post comment on Github thread to this end

• BSD-3-Clause minus clause 2
• * Paul to reach out to license author (who was not the one to ask license to be added

2) update on who’s going to Collab Summit

• who's going: Mark is going; Alan is waiting for an invite; Eric is a maybe; Dennis, Brad not making it

3) XML license templates project: Kris has done a second pass - see his previous email, updated wiki page here: http://wiki.spdx.org/view/Legal_Team/Templatizing/tags-matching, and actual source of files here: https://github.com/myndzi/license-list/tree/xml-test/src

• let’s be sure to carve out some time to plan next steps, including practical plan for reviewing license and possible need for scheduling of additional meetings
• cut and paste using something like Komodo
• setup different call w/Kris and Gary