Technical Team/Minutes/2010-11-16

2010-11-16 Weekly Technical Team Meeting

Attendees:

Kate Stewart, Bill Schineller, Peter Williams, Gary O'Neall

 

Topics:

• we now have a mailing list for technical team (thanks Kate)  self-register at http://spdx.org/wiki/spdx/spec-development  (click the 'mailing list here' link http://lists.spdx.org/mailman/listinfo/spdx-tech  )
• Peter reviewed the re-vamped structure of spec.html currently maintained in master branch of his github repo at https://github.com/pezra/spdx-spec    spec.html has directives for the rake task to include contents of section_2,3,4,5  such that one html file is generated with the complete ontology.  Team asked that the generated file also get committed (to lower the barrier of entry for someone wishing to look at the rendered html during development)
• Reviewed Peter's writeup of the composite license proposal at http://spdx.org/wiki/proposal-2010-10-21-4-composite-licensing    Team agreed the "OrLater" concept in the proposal best be split out into a separate proposal.  Bill asked technical question about whether the references to standard spdx licenses should use rdf:resource vs. rdf:Description... rdf:about   Bill asked whether the e.g. DisjunctiveLicenseSet should itself be a subclass of spdx:License; Peter's recommendation was that it be another object in the range of properties which currently have License in their range.
• Mozilla Tri-License usage scenario for composite license.  Proposal shows its usage in Package/Declared and Discovered licenses.  How to avoid repeating for every File object in a) RDF format and b) tag-value format?  Kate noted that if the 'Mozilla Tri-License' is well known to exist in the wild, then it is a good candidate for inclusion in the SPDX license list.  But more generally, team agreed it would be good form if a 'composite license' is encountered to model it once within the NonStandardLicense section of the SPDXDoc with a locally unique id and reference it from other places within the document.
• re: the artifactOf proposal, Kate noted that the tag-value example was unclear.  Peter and Kate discussed a convention...
• Peter raised idea of additional properties between licenses such as 'laterVersionOf'
• Bill asked about use case of SPDX analysis reporting the discovery of a phrase like "This file is licensed under the GPL' - clearly too ambiguous to map to one of the standard SPDX licenses, but perhaps of interest to consumer of an SPDX doc.  With current spec, *could* report such as a NonStandardLicense whenever encountered.  Raised idea (in future rev of spec?) of modeling license 'families' as an additional way to express associations between licenses, and allow reporting such a discovery in a standard way.
•  Time expired on the meeting.