Legal Team/Minutes/2012-09-19

Attendees

• Jilayne Lovejoy, OpenLogic
• Tom Incorvia, Micro Focus
• Mark Gisi, Wind River
• Jack Manbeck, TI
• Paul Madick, HP
• Jason Buttara, Cisco

FSF License List follow-up issues and update

• research that's been done (for these licenses and ones prior research) - would be nice to capture somewhere on website; separate wiki pages? would we then want to link to them from License List itself?? let's think about this (first priority to get up page about license list coordination)
• Debian list (Jack) - all good, no conflicts between their shortnames and our suggested short names for license additions (notes in spreadsheet below)
• OpenLDAP (Tom) - (see various emails about these; he got list of licenses from someone over there) in sum, there were multiple licenses with same license number and date, but didn't not match; of 24 licenses released, 19 were actually unique; then 2 were issued with same version number and date, but slight mismatch (punctuation on one and one word difference; these licenses were from 1999 and 2000); this would be a mismatch according to our current matching guidelines...
  • suggestion to either identify these differently or just add the most current version of these two (which may result in mismatches is people find the "first" version) -
  • in latter case, could make special rules for tools vendors around these licenses?
  • agreement to add all versions
  • re: what to do about two "versions" - start with corrected ones and then in parens call it corrected (in full name, but not short identifier) as well as note as to such
• BitTorrent (Jason) - we had v1.1, but what about 1.0 - no info found, really. Phillippe found that:
  • This V1.0 license that was used briefly for versions 3.9.x and early versions 4.x of BitTorrent circa 2005. Being a short-lived, seldom-used transitional license, a valid question is whether this is enough to justify having an SPDX license entry for it.
  • decided to add (to be consistent with adding other old licenses; no link to license precisely, but can find in old downloads
• this raises a bigger issue of at what point is the threshold of not adding licenses? can the License List be too long? advantage is added value of SPDX list as recording and having done such research (so someone else doesn't have to do it again) whether we need to change presentation format of License list as it grows is something we will have to address later
• Netizen Open Source License 1.0 (Jason): is this license really different from MPL 1.1? yes, they have a different choice of law and different disclaimer provision
  • add as separate license then
• still a few more research items to be done (Jilayne and Michael)
• also need to go through them and look for standard headers, if applicable...

Shareware and freeware licenses - to add or not to add?

• Michael Herzog brought this up on last call - but not here today, save conversation for when we have larger number on call (Paul and Mark had to drop off, so not enough for healthy discussion)

other to-dos

Looked at list of current priorities - what are priorities:

1. Website content updates (Jilayne has this) - needs to be done by early October
2. finish up with FSF list, add to v1.17 and release; then start working on Fedora list
   1. go through some of "issues" from 1.16 so we can resolve for 1.17 (started discussin these - see below)
3. get back on finishing matching guidelines (aka templatization)

license list "issues" (see v1.16 spreadsheet, and issues column)

• eCos License v2.0 - keep notes as is; not add additional information b/c it's more commentary/interpretation, which the notes are not meant capture
• Educational Community License 2.0 - not going to comment about a broken link; don't want to imply that we are tracking this. as for information text at top of license that is not really part of terms and conditions - this will be dealt with either via matching guidelines (or template of license)
• Erlang Public License - this note added is interpretive; we really don't want to get in business of writing out the history or describing the licenses, kind of opens a pandora's box; useful information is nice, but dno't want to then imply that no information means there is nothing
  • remove this note specifically; stick to the strict-ish guidelines we have made for the "notes" field on the license list; if we want to have additional information about licenses, it should go elsewhere

Action Items for two weeks

• website: legal section needs to be updated to conform to other team pages; add page for tracking license list coordination progress
• get FSF licenses to add in proper format to be added to pending v1.17 of License List (remaining research items)
• need to go through them and look for standard headers, if applicable...

Post-meeting update: uploaded new version (as per today's call) of FSF license spreadsheet with new worksheet listing proper License List columns and whether the license has been added to pending v1.17 (Jilayne started adding licenses to pending v1.17 of license list, looking at standard header field as adding them)