Legal Team/Minutes/2012-05-01

SPDX Legal Work Group Meeting Minutes - 1 May 2012

Attendees:

• David Wheeler
• Mark Gisi
• Michael Herzog
• Peter Williams
• Paul Madick
• Tom Incorvia
• Kevin Fleming
• Adam Cohn

1) Discuss status of Adding Licenses process

• decided to post proposal from 4/18 meeting on website and send to general mailing list for review and mention during tomorrow's General Meeting call (JILAYNE  to do)

2) somewhat related and mildly circuitous discussion regarding license headers/notices, the standard header field on the license list

• suggestion floated to simply drop this field from the license list
• another suggestion to change to "yes/no" - as in, yes, the license includes a suggested standard header, or no, it does not.  rationale being that where there is a standard header, it is merely cut and pasted from part of the license text anyway, so this is duplicitous
• in meantime, may need to clarify/revise description of this field here - http://www.spdx.org/wiki/spdx-license-list
• value of having standard header field is for identification purposes, an additional way to definitively identify it's Foo License besides matching on the entire license text (this is probably inline with license author's intent of including it!)
• all agreed there are many "non-standard" headers in the wild, but trying to track those or create that list is another project that we can't do (at least not right now)

3) statements on vision for: a) SPDX work groups, b) legal group specifically, and c) license list more specifically.  Adam proposed the following as to the first - did not have time to discuss, but would like to do so and then distribute to other groups.  need to draft items for b and c.

Adam's proposed text:

"To enable any party in the software supply chain, from the original author to the final end user, to accurately communicate and understand the licensing information for any piece of copyrightable material that such party may create, alter, pass on, or receive, and to make such information available in a consistent, understandable, and re-usable fashion, with the aim of facilitating license and other policy compliance."

TASKS FOR NEXT CALL:

1. Review Adam's proposed text to discuss on next call - ALL
2. draft vision/goals statement for legal group, distribute to group, so we can discuss on next call - PAUL
3. draft vision/goals statement for license list, distribute to group, so we can discuss on next call  - JILAYNE
4. review current to-do list (see: http://www.spdx.org/wiki/legal-team-current-issues-last-updated-april-6 ) and note anything that's missing (need to go over and prioritize on subsequent call) - ALL