Legal Team/Minutes/2013-08-29

Attendees

• Jilayne Lovejoy, OpenLogic
• Jack Manbeck, TI
• Zak White, Entente
• Scott Lamons, HP
• Michael Herzog, NexB
• Daniel German, U. of Victoria
• Tom Vidal, Abrams Garfinkel Margolis Bergson
• Phil Odence, Black Duck

Agenda

License Matching Guidelines - templates - discussed various issues that have come up with templates so far, to further refine process and guidelines, etc.

• review/affirmation from last meeting's discussion: no mark-up for extraneous text that occurs after the end of license terms (e.g. appendix, exhibit, instructions re: how to apply license); will cover this with a guideline. Jilayne did a first draft of such a guideline, which was sent to group via email. Reproduced below for reference

GNU licenses, GPLv2 as example:

• Preamble - is this part of the license? that is, if someone removed the preamble, would it still be okay to call it a positive match to the license (GPL or LGPL, various versions)?
• sentence at start of licensing stating: have seen cases where this sentence was omitted, would that still be a match?
  • in both the above cases, inclination was to not make a guideline or markup stating this is omit-able, even though in practice, if one found the GPLv2 with the preamble missing, which resulted in a mis-match for the LicenseInFile field of the spec, one would probably conclude the license to be GPLv2 in the ConcludedLicense field in the spec.
  • some worry that to make an affirmative statement it can be omitted might cause concern in the community or implicate a "judgment" where one is not meant to be made
• FSF address under copyright notice - FSF has moved, shouldn't matter which address for license matching purposes; is this part of the copyright notice (and therefore, already covered under Guideline # ) or should this be marked as "replaceable" text?

FYI:

• License List v1.19 to be released on Friday , Sept 6

Action Items

1. Jilayne/Phil to reach to Eben to enquire about Preamble and first sentence in regards to license matching
2. Jilayne to send a description for LinuxCon discussion to Jack to post on schedule; sent email to Legal team
3. other team leaders: also spread the word re: LinuxCon discussion
4. ALL: review other comments and questions in Google doc templates and comment there, so we can resolve various issues by next week (9/5)
5. ALL: review draft guideline and submit comments via email list - to finalize at next meeting on 9/12
6. ALL: see email re: Ruby license and comment via email list