Legal Team/Minutes/2012-01-11

SPDX Legal Workstream Meeting Minutes - 11 January 2012

• Tom Incorvia, Microfocus
• Michael Herzog, NexB
• Mark Gisi, Windriver
• Jilayne Lovejoy, OpenLogic

(started late due to miscommunication b/w Rockett and Jilayne re: who was leading call, apologies to anyone who joined and then dropped off from waiting)

TOPICS:

I)  new data license - CC-Zero + preamble

Mark has a document explaining the rationale for the data license discussions of late last year, which he will update now that we have decided.  This will be posted in the legal section of the website, once the new site is up.

ACTION ITEM: Jilayne to get latest version (with any minor edits) to Mark; to Kim; and post on new site

ACTION ITEM: Mark to update/complete rationale document and post on new site

II)Templatizing Licenses 

Jilayne previously sent latest version of guidelines.  feedback on that:

• guidelines state to ignore bullets v. numbering v. lettering for sub-parts of license;  however, this is not going to work b/c some licenses (e.g. Eclipse) have references to the numbered sections in other parts of the license
• what about BSD?  sometimes uses bullets, sometimes numbers for clauses, wouldn't want to consider such a "different" license for this reason only.  Can we make this part of template for just BSD example (because need to templatize BSD anyway?) are there other license where this would be a factor?  Technological/tool considerations here?
• British v. American spelling list - Tom pointed out that in some cases it's not clear which is which nor does it matter as concern is equivalency (not etymology) --> change list to equivalents

ACTION ITEM:  Jilayne to update templatizing guidelines as per above notes/observations

ACTION ITEM:  GROUP to review and further discussion needed at next meeting

III)  License List

no progress, but next version in the works still;  Tom suggested a review of shortnames and licenses as long as we are in process

ACTION ITEM: Jilayne to circle back with OSI re: outstanding issues and get list uploaded

IV) Other

A) License approval process - we need to get up to date on this.  Where is the latest iteration?  Needs to be vetted, finalized, and posted on website

** Jilayne spoke to Kim; latest iteration is thought to be somewhere in business team minutes, so she will look for and to be discussed at next general and business team meetings;  

B) License v. license notice

discussed issue when generating SPDX file of identifying a license via a license notice versus the license itself.  That is, we do not want license notices to be added to the license list as a license - how to decide when a notice means XYZ license where XYZ license does not have a standard notice/header

• do we need guidelines around this?
• do we need a separate field in the spec for this information?
• how do you handle the structure of this in the data? how do you enable reconstruction of what was in file?  is this non-standard notice simply put in the comments section?
• further, what about notices of a disjunctive license scenario?

ACTION ITEM: Michael to come up with a couple examples for further discussion