Legal Team/non-English-licenses

Working Page for Policy on Non-English Licenses

The issue of how or how to best handle licenses in languages other than English or with multiple language translations has come up repeatedly over the years of the SPDX License List's existence. This is especially critical in relation to how short identifiers are assigned and when a license is considered a match (or a different license). There are a number of non-English licenses or licenses with multiple language translations on the SPDX License List and the treatment thereof has formed a sort of "default policy". However, such treatment is not complete and does not fully address the question of license matching.

Jilayne Lovejoy and Kate Stewart presented the background of the issue and current "default policy" along with a list of questions to an international audience at the FSFE Legal and Licensing Workshop in April 2017. This page is for capturing various discussions that have come out of that to try to form concrete proposals to be considered by the larger SPDX community and then a sensible and complete policy formed.

As a starting point, please review the slides from the presentation available here: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1miQz9F7q_oVbYCibTuhSrJ_qog6eHWs0DxcXxQ-ZLuk/edit?usp=sharing

Summary of current "default policy" and questions/issues to be resolved

By way of summary (also in the above slides), the SPDX License List default policy for non-English license can be described as:

1. Add the license to the SPDX License List in the "canonical" or original language; or the language version as requested (or what came first)
2. Assign a short identifier based on 1
3. If the license has "official" translations, then provide links to such translations in the notes field (but do not add translations as different languages) where "official" translations are those by the license author or otherwise blessed by the license author

the above implies the following:

• one short identifiers can be used for all official translations
• one can consider a match across any official translation

Key Questions / Issues

• How do we determine if it's "official"?
  • Is it enough to trust the license author?
  • What other criteria can be used (if translation is not done by license author or license author is not available)?
• How do we deal with "unofficial" translations?
  • If use different identifier, will that be confusing?
  • GPL has designated unofficial translations (and a defined policy) available here: https://www.gnu.org/licenses/translations.html The FSF makes it clear that the English language license prevails and that translations in other languages help with understanding the GPL. In this case, it would see that the same short identifier should not be used and an unofficial translation in another language would not constitute a match to the original English text. As such, then what should the short identifier be in this case? As the main goal of the SPDX License List is license identification, it is helpful to indicate this is a translation, even if unofficial.
• How do we use matching? Does a translation in one language constitute a match to a translation in another language? If so, then how do we implement that for tools and in the context of the XML file change?