Technical Team/Minutes/2012-09-04

Minutes 9/4/2012

Attendees:

Gary O’Neall, Bill Schineller, Kate Stewart, Jack Manbeck, Michael Herzog, Ed Warnicke, Peter Williams, Kirsten Newcomer, Marshall Clow

 

Agenda:

• Re-cap of Linux Con discussions
• Discussion of recent blog post expressing confusion about SPDX
• Ed Warnicke proposal / demo of 'Watermarking'  

Re-cap of Linux Con discussions

• Kate: 1.1 spec draft and rdf got in sync, releaseable
• Fossology intent to provide Agent to produce 1.1 SPDX announced
• Deferred modeling discussions while at Linux Con
• Ed W. socialized idea of 'Watermarking' approach

Discussion sparked by recent blog post:

• http://www.murrayc.com/blog/permalink/2012/08/31/generating-spdx-files-with-licensecheck/
• Jack: idea for validation suite - future agenda item?
• Kate: need to update examples - volunteer to do 'time' package
• Kate: idea for "plug fest" at next Linux Collab summit - encourage those who support/produce SPDX to do so for same package and compare results?

Watermarking Proposal / Demo (Ed Warnicke)

• Source files and their compiled output are the "leaves" of hierarchies of copyrightable 'things', so can SPDX specify a watermarking approach to put licensing information directly in source files?
• Reqts: Machine-readable, close to leaf, flows through hierarchy
• Demonstrated for the C language an spdx.h defining a macro SPDX_INFO.  Including this header, then compiling results in an introspectable compiled output

Reactions to demo: 

• Peter - "ship it"? !
• Ed: our 'one chance' to get it right with upstream providers, don't rush it
• Michael: let's decouple the spec from its 'enabling technologies"
• Issues: concern about the SIZE compiling strings into object code adds to the distros. 
• Let's determine what's 'acceptable' size bloat (none!...) and think about other languages too