Difference between revisions of "Legal Team/Current Projects and Issues"

Revision as of 18:00, 16 May 2012

Current issues/topics (this is a general list and may not touch upon everything) -- updated May 16

1) Mission/Vision statement
A) Legal Work Group - revised version posted in 5/16 meeting minutes - to be finalized on 5/30 call

B) License List description and overview -revised version posted in 5/16 meeting minutes - to be finalized on 5/30 call 

2) Website updates and refresh
A) aligning language and updates on various parts of the current site:

1. Specification refers to the license list as "Standard Short Names"  - should be consistently referred to as the "SPDX License List"; also, the description needs to be revised and one of the links is probably not correct
2. License List info page http://spdx.org/wiki/spdx-license-list - updated as needed, Jilayne
3. License List main page http://spdx.org/licenses/ - calls it the "SPDX Open Source License Registry" - needs to be changed to "SPDX License List"  - Gary or Martin? (add description (goal/vision) here too?)
4. add something about how we are coordinating or aligning with other license lists? (e.g. OSI, FSF, Debian, etc.) - either in its own section or FAQ?

B) Website refresh - fill in pages, link over content ?? need update from Mark Gisi on this

3) License List 
A) License List updates for v1.16

1. Add MPL 2.0 other header version (for time being to be consistent with GPL)
2. finish license text review of .txt files - still some to do
3. formatting/text issue for Cecill licenses in French
4. add US Gov't works - add short identifier to list; see email from David Wheeler
5. proposal to add some kind of short identifier for copyright notice only (and "all rights reserved"?" - Fedora has this, maybe adopt what they use?

B) OSI updates from emails (changes to v1.16) and then summarize outstanding issues  - Jilayne, in progress

C) Other issues (see issues column on latest License List download for details - to start covering with v1.16 update)

1. GPL exceptions - we don't have them all, list some of the others and variations on text - can someone do some research on this issue?
2. various other more issues - see spreadsheet

D) Community outreach and list coordination

1. FSF license list match-up; found here: http://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html -- licenses that need to be added? Jilayne has done initial pass - Paul to do further research and come up with list of those on FSF and not on SPDX for approval to be added or not
2. Fedora license list -- Jilayne has begun discussion with Tom Calloway, needs follow-up
3. Debian
4. Gentoo

3) Formatting and "master list" for License List (i.e. actual license text files)
Currently the "master" consists of spreadsheet with list + individual .txt files for license text field = downloadable zip file.  This is then converted into html pages for website.  Peter, Gary, and Jilayne have had initial discussion on this issue; to be discussed further with more fleshed out proposal

A) PROPOSAL: License text files formatted in HTML instead of .txt files as default; can convert from there into text file with tool if people want that too;  Option to use HTML to indicate some of matching rules?

B) For back-end management of License List overall: proposal to use Bugzilla and GIT repository in background for management  - easier tracking of changes and gets it off Jilayne's desktop

4) Recommendations or guidance on how to best determine license for a particular file
how to identify the license for an open source project - ex. Within the file versus whether there's a copying file on top of the directory → provide guidance/suggstion (industry practice?) that license in the file is more determinate than the license in the directory

Should the legal group aggregate industry best practices and come up with a group of guidelines and provide some influence on that?