Legal Team/Minutes/2012-02-22

SPDX Legal Team Meeting Minutes - 22 Feb 2012

• Paul Madick, HP
• Adam Cohn, Cisco
• Peter Williams, OpenLogic
• Michael Herzog, NexB
• Tom Incorvia, Microfocus
• Esteban Rockett, Motorola
• Jilayne Lovejoy, OpenLogic

AGENDA:

1) agenda for April 6 SPDX Summit

• legal team - "scared" people away last time, what can we do to avoid that, especially make sure to cover standard license text
• make sure to cover goal and concept of License List; as a resource 
• who will be there: Rockett, Michael (hopefully), Adam (yes), Tom (no)
• tooling part - important to include future roadmap for tooling
• agenda seems to be broken down into two types of audiences: 1) what is it, how do I get started; 2) what is it, not interested in it now, but want to get involved and know what it's going to look like in the future
• concern that audience won't know what group they are in; suggestion to mix it up and not segment along these lines so distinctly

2) License List

• License .txt file review (see license list page for .zip download with spreadsheet and all .txt files): need to check license text in newly formed .txt files (some numbering got stripped out when cut and pasted into the spreadsheet and made into text files; remove any coding items, i.e. astericks or hashes at beginning of line); email Jilayne revised .txt files if changes made or notice that everything was good.  If issues that need discussion, bring to next meeting.
• Paul - lines 2-12
• Adam - lines 13-19, 23-27 (Cecill licenses)
• Peter - 28-34, 60-64
• Jilayne - 35-39 (Creative Common license set)
• Michael - 65-77
• Rockett - 78-90
• Tom - BSD license research

 

• License list issues: (see green text in last column in spreadsheet)
• BSD license - Tom to investigate
• "or later" - really same license, but differentiation is within header; may have additional license choices going forward when "or later" - more information for reviewer than actual license terms
• choice is made when package is used - discussion re: disjunctive license notice generally
• should we have disjunctive license set? disjunctive part is really notice
• do we have a field for license header or notice: extracted license for that info (whether full license text or notice or header) - how do we extract those three pieces of information?
• do we want to have SPDX to build a database of common license notices (if not now, then at some point)? hard to do in spreadsheet, but from tooling perspective pretty easy
• continuum of information from headers: just "standard" license headers as currently defined; expand to common references to particular licenses; expand to common disjunctive license notices
• we are at the first step now - where do we go from here and how to proceed?

for next call: To-do items in License List are either GPL or later issue, GPL + exception question or other smaller issues.  Next time, we will try to dispense with the smaller (easier) issues on list first to get those out of the way.  GPL "or later" issues ties to license match discussion, so probably best to discuss all together.