Legal Team/Minutes/2013-09-12

Attendees

• Jilayne Lovejoy
• Jack Manbeck
• Tom Incorvia
• Jason Buttara
• Scott Lamons
• Mark Gisi
• Paul Madick
• Tom Vidal
• Michael Herzog
• Daniel German

Agenda

1) Ruby License: Ruby has a notice at the top of the license stating the disjunctive licensing choice, which has changed (was Ruby or GPLv2; now is Ruby or BSD-2-Clause). We had previously decided to drop this notice text (instead of treating it as a different license). However, it turns out there are differences in the substantive license text itself. Issue: how to capture? Ruby does not version the license, so confusion is easy to occur (anyone know someone there? could we ask them to version number the license?) What to do in regards to the SPDX LIcense List?? See attached file for comparison. --> looking at changelog; change from GPLv2 to BSD-2-Clause disjunctive choice was in Sept 15, 2010, but not sure when other text changed - appears that other text changed incrementally, much earlier (in between 1.4 and 1.6 of Ruby) making it hard to determine where to call it different versions... could we correspond to releases of project, perhaps?

• Scott has had contact with someone at Ruby and can correspond to ask:

1. did the substantive text of the license change at all the same time (it looks like mostly this occurred in 2001)? Can we get a detailed account of what changed when and how that corresponds to various releases of Ruby. (from there we can decide together how to proceed in naming and for purposes of the SPDX License List)

• for current SPDX License List purposes - do we leave it as is until resolved or take it off the list for now until this is resolved? much discussion on pros and cons of these options...

--> remove - it is not OSI approved; current situation means we have text for older version and link to current version, which only adds to potential confusion/ambiguity in that people will continue to use that short identifier perhaps incorrectly; SPDX Legal is researching the variations and communicating with Ruby to come to an accurate solution/way to represent the different license variations. This will also raise some awareness around the ambiguity, which is good as some projects simply say the license is the "same as Ruby's" which does not even indicate whether the disjunctive choice is GPL or BSD.

Action Items

1. Jilayne to take research Daniel did on changes to Ruby license and summarize to group; Group can then come up with a proposed solution for naming to submit to Ruby project
2. ALL: review proposed additional guideline in email for meeting agenda and comment
3. ALL: comment/respond to various emails re: matching guidelines progress