General Meeting/Minutes/2017-12-07

Guest Speaker - Pedro Giffuni - FreeBSD

Overview and history of FreeBSD
Licensing - several variations of licenses, difficult to keep track
- Mostly free of copyleft (exceptions tools like gcc)
- Mix of BSD styles, MIT, ISC
SPDX helps solve some of the issues with non-uniform licenses
SPDX helps describe licenses when sharing code with other projects
- Used WindRiver service to do initial identifications
- Identified licenses needed manual review - not all of the license matches were precise
- Breakdown of the licenses found was provided
Pedro has been adding the SPDX tags
Currently, only tagged C files ahd headers
Build files and documentation still need to be tagged
Just adding tag, not removing the licenses
- Discussion on the advantages / disadvantages of keeping the license
- Most important aspect is to add the SPDX ID for easy identification
Question on tagging some of the non-core files
- Other projects are outside the tree and not currently tagged - they are maintained by other groups

SPDX proposals for 2.2 and 3.0 versions of the spec are now in github
Some discussion on extending the license expression to include an ambiguous operator
Some discussion on various tooling effort including the tools presented by Thomas in Prague
Most tooling efforts have been focused on supporting the legal team move to the license XML format
Kate and Philippe provided an update on the use of license ID's in the Linux Kernel
- All files now have detectable licenses!
- LWN has an article describing the effort: https://lwn.net/Articles/739183/
Philippe presented at the Paris Open Source summit

Moving to new wordpress website
Encouraged everyone to take a look at the site (note: you will need access to sign in)
Target to move in December, but it may end up being January

Closed the GPL identifier issue requested by the FSF
- The updated solution was accepted by FSF and Richard Stallman
We are now in "feature freeze" for the next release
- We should hold off on opening up or discussing larger issues not related to the next release
- Effort should be focused on resolving remaining issues in the github repository