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Legal Team/Minutes/2012-03-07

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SPDX Legal Team - meeting minutes for 7 March 2012

  • Tom Incorvia, Microfocus
  • Adam Cohn, Cisco
  • Colin Wright, McKesson
  • Mark Gisi, Windriver
  • Peter Williams, OpenLogic
  • Michael Herzog, NexB
  • Jilayne Lovejoy, OpenLogic
  • Karen Copenhaver, Choate Hall
  • Luis Villa, Greenberg Taurig

Agenda:

  1. Update on various feedback
  2. to-do's on the hopper - including priority items to get done before April 6 SPDX Forum in San Jose

("assignments" and action items in all caps)

1) License List is getting more attention as seen by recent correspondance by persons outside the group looking to use the license list as a reference/standard/resource for referring to licenses.  Take-away of this is the the License List is shaping up to be an "entry point" from SPDX generally, i.e. easier to adopt names, as many organizations have a need to have a standard way to refer to licenses. from there may lead to adoption of spec.  Sub-text - even higher priority/pressure to resolve outstanding issues and create guidelines for matching, etc. so we can move to a more stable maintenence role.   

  • Notably: Phil, Karen, and Jilayne had a call with David Wheeler from IDA regarding having the license list include a way to identify U.S. Gov't works and the legal reality that that represents.  David is going to send some standard headers, so this will be something to add to the list and configure in the near future.  
    • will entail a new short identifier, possibly an explanation and reference to relevant U.S. statutes and may include multiple headers that "point" to this same designation.
    • JILAYNE AND KAREN TO FOLLOW-UP AND GET PROPOSAL GOING FOR THIS

2) To-dos:

  • finish license text review
    • got licenses back from Adam, Phil, Paul, Peter; Michael and Rockett still working on theirs.  There were many changes/updates, so good we did this!
    • goal to have this DONE by next call - about 60 more licenses to assign. volunteers for next round listed below.  if anyone else can assist, please tell Jilayne asap!! see http://spdx.org/wiki/legal-team-meeting-minutes-2012-02-22 for description of process
      • COLIN  - lines 102 thru 113
      • ADAM  - lines 114 thru 125
      • PHIL - lines 126 thru 137
  • OSI license list issues - Karl Fogel responded (email went to group)
    • JILAYNE TO FOLLOW-UP SEE IF WE CAN GET ISSUES SORTED BY APRIL 6TH FORUM
  • resolve other License List issues among group: (see further discussion below)
    • BSD Licenses overview - Tom sent email to group prior to meeting for discussion, see for reference
      • recommendation to ADD: BSD 4-Clause specific to the U. of California in order to accomodate the scenario where a original 4-clause license is retroactively turned into a 3-clause as per July 22, 1999 notice from William Hoskins, Directore of Office of Tech Licensing, UC-Berkeley
        • in contrast, a match to the "plain" BSD 4-clause will not carry this retroactive change and just refer to the full 4 clause license
        • add to license list along with the notice in the Notes field and an explanation as needed
        • DECISION BY GROUP: Yes to adding this license
      • text variations such as "copyright holder" v. "copyright owner" - equivalent? can we handle via equivalent words list or need to deal with more broadly in matching guidelines? also need to consider where "or contributors" is present or not
        • under US law, "copyright holder" v. "copyright owner" can be considered the same, but would want European perspective on this - PENDING someone on call who can speak to this
        • generally, these issues need to be dealt with via the license match guidelines for when to "ignore" some of this text - TBD
      • Review of current naming of various BSD licenses - okay as is, no change recommended
      • FreeBSD and NetBSD both have an extra line at end or beginning.  under matching guidelines this would be considered a different license (than standard BSD).  Due to there both being prominent projects, should these two licenses be added as separate?
        • TOM TO SEND EMAIL TO LIST TO DESCRIBE SCENARIO AND DISCUSS AT NEXT MEETING
    • also discussed concept of buckets for types of licenses, i.e. attribution v. permissive - bunch of ideas around this, as well as acknowledgement that this may go beyond scope of SPDX?  
      • Mark to submit proposal for review by group as not enough time to discuss now
    • MPL 2.0 exhibits discussion (including discussion of GPL only or or later) - Luis Villa joined call to assist with explanation and guidance
      • Luis gave an overview of the MPL v2.0 exhibits and rationale behind (also on previous email thread)
      • discussed in tangent with GPL only v. or later issue - currently have these as separate line items on License List - everyone agrees that capturing that distinction is key/wanted, but how best to do so?  how we have it currently or one license line item with the options of different headers?
        • suggested to have some kind of modifiers, i.e license is GPL v2 and modfied with an "or later" or "only" (or even "exception") designator
        • different list for headers? that inter-operates with License List?
        • legal team needs to decide WHAT needs to be identified then go to technical team to determine HOW to implement
        • suggested futher discussion on next call and set aside time during workgroup meeting on Thursday, April 5 at Linux Collab Summit to flesh this issue out a bit more.
    • GPL exceptions - how do we "define" the actua license text (for the license list itself, as well as matching guidelines: should it be the license itself plus the exception text or the exception text only?)
  • license matching guidelines - finish/pickup where left off a couple calls ago. still need to cover the headers/notices matching issue and replaceable text (template) issues as the big remaining items - gets intertwined with License List issues
  • website migration - no progress on this and legal team is now weak link - need someone to take on this task and get done asap.  May also need to re-think navigation for legal portion as well as additional pages/information but for now, just need to get stuff copied/moved into new format.
    • MARK TO TAKE LEAD WITH THIS (MAY ENGAGE PIERRE FOR HELP, IF NEEDED)
  • Process for adding new licenses to list
    • currently with business team, but does it make sense to have it go back to legal team or a sub-group thereof
    • current process discussed is outlined here:  http://spdx.org/wiki/process-adding-license-list-draft
    • ideally need to review this and be able to describe at SPDX Forum on April 6

 

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