Difference between revisions of "Legal Team/Minutes/2013-06-20"

Latest revision as of 18:33, 20 June 2013

Attendees

• Jilayne Lovejoy
• Tom Vidal
• Tom Incorvia
• Jack Manbeck
• Zac White
• Michael Herzog
• Paul Madick
• Jason Buttura

Agenda

1) License tracking table – need an owner (Dennis was volunteered by Michael last call…) Michael confirmed Dennis has accepted the task! Dennis to contact Jilayne and Jack re: making sure he has proper wiki login, etc.

2) GPL Exceptions – update from Tom V.

• has a list going, is going to reach out to Bradley to confirm / review list
• time on next meeting agenda to review this/ go over - note, next meeting is 7/18 (not the 4th!!)

3) Fedora List – update from Paul M. - can we start looking at licenses that are on Fedora list, but not on SPDX list?

• about more than half way through; will keep working on it, but team to start reviewing the license on Fedora's "good" list that are not on SPDX-LL to determine whether or not to add
• Paul will send spreadsheet for this task the day before the next meeting 7/18

4) license matching guidelines – update on progress there (from Gary if on call)

• Gary and Daniel working on implementation plans and process - discussion mostly on Tech Team list
• key thing is Daniel needs licenses to start working on with ommitable and replaceable text identified - from legal team.
• instead of going down the list top-to-bottom, start with most common licenses that are also likely to need markup:
• BSD, Apache, GPL, LGPL, Eclipse, MIT, MPL v1.1, CDDL, CPL,
  • legal team will mark-up in a text file by indicating REPLACEABLE text in red highlighting or text; and OMITTABLE text in blue highlighting or text
  • for REPLACEABLE text, provide one example of a replacement
    • EPL - Tom Incorvia
    • BSD-3clause; BSD-2-clause; GPLv2; Apache 1.1 - Jilayne
    • Apache 2.0 - Paul
    • GPL v3 - Zac
    • MIT - Jason
    • MPL 1.1 - Michael
  • email your document with markup to legal team, so we can discuss via email in meantime since next meeting is in a month (recommend to use some kind of neutral document format, e.g. .rtf, if possible)

also: Michael brought up issue about GPL-only or GPL-or-later - this issue has been revisited on the Tech Team in regards to potentially coming up with a better way to capture this distinction, etc. No distinct proposal yet, but Michael was sent as messager to say , 'heads up.'

• we discussed a little as to why it is the way it is, some of the shortcomings (not the least of which is that the license web pages do not include the standard header field, which is on the spreadsheet - this is where the distinction between "only" or "or later" is designated.
• also recognized the need for capturing the "back story" on this issue for those who joined the group later
• Michael to add this as an item with a short summary of the issue to the Current Priorities/Work in Progress page on the Legal Team, so that it's transparent that we know this is a potential issue. Jilayne will add links to meeting minutes of past discussions as well, to help others understand the background.
• Also identified need for "how to" or "practical tips" for creating an SPDX file and identifying licenses; e.g. if you find a non-standard notice that simply says, "this is licensed under the GPL" with no indication of version, then as per the GPL, the licensee can choose any version. Thus, using the SPDX-LL short identifier for GPL-1.0-or-later would capture this reality. Another item that needs to be done...
• important to note that any change here or any practical tips around the GNU licenses will need to be vetted with the FSF before the change is made