Legal Team/Minutes/2012-01-25

SPDX Legal Workstream Meeting Minutes - 25 January 2012

In attendance:

• Jilayne Lovejoy, OpenLogic
• Tom Incoriva, Microfocus
• Mark Gisi, Windriver
• Phil Odence, Black Duck
• Peter Williams, OpenLogic
• Mansour Ghomeshi, Motorola
• Esteban Rockett, Motorola
• Michael Herzog, NexB

AGENDA

I - update on CC-0 Preamble

• changed "copyrightable material" to "copyrightable work" in second and third paragraphs. 

ACTION ITEM: Jilayne to update this on SPDX wiki page with preamble

II - Review draft License List Match Guidelines (templatizing)

went through guideline document by section;  change focus from normalizing on guidelines - to just offering guidelines and let tools makers implement

White Space

• if one sentence moves to another paragraph, it would be treated the same;  does this matter, can we find a use case where this would matter? could treat paragraph break as different than other whitespace breaks
• seems okay to treat all white space the same; leave as is in guidelines

Capitalization - okay as is

Puncuation - okay as is

Bullets and Numbering

• as to bullets/numbers, just say ignore these
• this would require flagging this text within licenses that have references 
• can we ignore the bullet/number/letter, but not "lose" that info (so you still see it later), otherwise it would be unreadable - really internal details for tools anyway
• can we just start here and see how it goes?  Licenses that have internal references are less likely to have changes with numbering anyway
• start here, and modify later if needed

Varietal Word Spelling

• decision to re-word description re: British/American spelling to just equivalent spelling since geography is a non-issue
• are there any words where there may be 3 different spelling? list only has two columns
• Can't think of any example, but would be same - not 
• what about if a word is misspelled?  - slippery slope to try and deal with this; if misspelled consistently in license, then will just match on misspelling;  
• Can watch to see if this comes up/examples

Copyright Symbol

• okay as is - just say all three options are equivalent

Copyright notice

• copyright notice line guideline:  is the copyright notice at the top of BSD really part of the license?
• License is something that should be fixed; where does license notice fall in this?
• Copyright notice applies to file; but license is the actual text, not the notice (which may say you have to reproduce the copyright notice)
• Should we then strip the copyright notice out altogether in our license list?
• Copyright notice for license itself is distinct, so keep - but most cases it would not be part of license itself
• How does this impact our license list - e.g. "GPL or later" where there isn't really an "or later" license, but is really just a notice
• Then raises question of how to deal with preambles and epilogue?

→ next time pick up here with discussion and may tie into conversation re: headers

ACTION ITEM: update License List Match Guidelines and post on wiki page on spdx.org (current page posted is outdated)