Technical Team/Use Cases/2.0

We have several sources to begin pulling for SPDX Use Cases:

1. The Pad from earlier conversations collected at <a href="http://spdx.org/wiki/use-cases-collected-20-discussion">Use Cases For SPDX 2.0 Discussion</a>
2. The old <a href="https://fossbazaar.org/wiki/spdx-use-case-1">SPDX 1.0 Use Cases</a> as well as the <a href="http://spdx.org/system/files/ecosystem.jpg">SDPX 1.0 Use Case Picture</a>.

 

I'd like to propose that we flesh out use cases here by having a brief summary listed here as a link to a more detailed child page.   Note, these use cases should be *doable* but in general not *required*.  Any item listed here that is not a link, should have a child page created for it.

 

1. <a href="http://spdx.org/wiki/spdx-20-usecase-upstream-maintainer-providing-spdx-data">Upstream maintainer providing SPDX data</a>
2. Upstream maintainer consuming another project
1. Upstream maintainer including another project by including source
2. Upstream maintainer including another project by reference (think maven, possibly linking cases)
1. by static reference (the referenced library is included with a redistribution)
2. by dynamic reference (express runtime dependency on the external library, but not redistributing it)
3. Upstream maintainer pulling individual files out of another project (subsetting)
3. Intermediate packager (rpm, deb, etc) passing on and adding to SPDX Data
1. Intermediate packager subsetting upstream package
4. Yocto [Jack Manbeck]
5. Aggregator aggregating many 'copyrightable items' for redistribution
1. Linux Distros [Kate Stewart]
2. Embedded Images
3. SDKs
4. Reference implementations [Jack Manbeck]
5. Eclipse/OSGI distributions
6. Application which ships with documentation +  media + software [Jack Manbeck]
6. Aggregators aggregating other aggergations for redistribution
7. Asserting corrections to SPDX data provided by others further upstream
8. Committers providing, or assenting to SPDX data
9. Committers annotating source files with SPDX info
10. Consumers receiving SPDX data
11. Signoff/multiple signoff on SPDX data
1. Contracts with multiple parties requiring signoff by all [Kate Stewart]
12. Auditor scenario: given big pile of 'copyrightable items', creating Bill of Materials [Peter Williams]
13. Sanity-checking Bill of Material
1. outbound: validate that SPDX goes hand in hand with what's being shipped [Kirsten Newcomer]
2. inbound:  validate that SPDX goes hand in hand with what's being brought in 

 

Cross-cutting concerns:

1. Provenance (the need to optionally use signing to validate who said what)
2. Handling staleness of data
3. Expressing applicable licensing as a function of Usage [Bill Schineller]
4. Permissive licensed thing becomes restrictive as function of packaging (e.g. BSD file included in GPL becomes GPL)

 

Themes:

 

Looking at these Use Cases, there are some underlying themes:

1. Root of data (closer to upstream the better)
2. Subsetting of copyrightable things (and their SPDX data) (Note: Subsets of copyrightable things are usually also copyrightable things)
3. Aggregation of copyrightable things (and their SPDX data) (Note: Aggregations of copyrightable things are usually also copyrightable things).