Legal Team/Current Projects and Issues

LAST UPDATED: 25 April 2013

SPDX Legal Team projects for 2013

License List requests/additions tracking page

owner: Jack Manbeck (goal to get this up and current by end of May)

1. create wiki page with table for tracking, with relevant/appropriate columns
2. propagate with recent and outstanding requests
3. update going forward

Review process for requesting a new license webpage

owner: Jason (first pass by 5/3, team to review at 5/10 meeting

OSI outstanding issues

owner: Jilayne

1. various OSI approved (but old or deprecated) licenses don't have corresponding link on OSI site; OSI to update and then SPDX to add link to SPDX-LL
2. Artistic license issue
3. futher clarification on a few previous issues (were APSL-1.0, APSL-1.1, and GPL-2.0 ever approved?)
4. zlib/ libpng license clarification
5. Jabber Open Source License v1.0 – archived text here (http://archive.jabber.org/core/JOSL.pdf) is not the same as the OSI has on their site (it was OSI approved). What do we do about this? need to resolve with OSI (with goal of having on list b/c it was OSI approved and we endeavored to have all OSI licenses on SPDX list, even if old). license text also can be found at: http://code.google.com/p/jabber-net/wiki/FAQ_License

License Matching Guidelines - implement markup

once final method for markup has been decided upon, we will need to go through all licenses on current list and create appropriate markup files for each. Legal team will divvy up work and may ask for help from technical team as well. We will invariably find issues that will need to be discussed along the way - using the legal team bi-weekly calls for such discusssion

GPL exceptions

owner: Tom Vidal (goal to have this reasonably done by end of June)

• We don't have them all and there are also the issue of inconsistencies "in the wild" among named exceptions and actual text (i.e. not all exceptions found called Foo exception have the exact same text; how do we deal with this?)

Community outreach and list coordination

Goal of coordinating with various other license lists to make sure SPDX has licenses from these lists and check short name matching (or create "translation" document if different)

Fedora license list

owner: Paul Madick (goal to have first pass for Legal Team to begin reviewing by mid-June)

• will need to check lists for discrepancies, i.e. are there licenses on Fedora list that are not on SPDX-LL and if so, decide to add; also need to create short-name matching matrix due to Fedora using different type of categorization for its short names

Fossology

owner: TBD assigned

• coordinate with Bob Gobeille, see http://www.fossology.org/projects/fossology/wiki/MatchSPDXLicenceIDs

Gentoo

owner: TBD assigned

Suse

owner: TBD assigned

• list found here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/pub?key=0AqPp4y2wyQsbdGQ1V3pRRDg5NEpGVWpubzdRZ0tjUWc (courtesy of Ciaran Farrell from 6/27/12 email list thread)

Recommendations or guidance on how to best determine license for a particular file

'how to identify the license for an open source project - ex. Within the file versus whether there's a copying file on top of the directory ? provide guidance/suggstion (industry practice?) that license in the file is more determinate than the license in the directoryShould the legal group aggregate industry best practices and come up with a group of guidelines and provide some influence on that?