Tech Reports

Tech Report Program Overview

The SPDX Tech Report program has been created to encourage individuals to write small or large reports to capture, store and share collective knowledge relevant to SPDX's well being and the processes it supprts. The knowledge base covers a variety of topics including (but not limited to): technical considerations, best practices with respect to creating and using SPDX data, relevant legal topics, tool proposals, adoption strategies and analysis, license compliance considerations and so forth. Periodically an SPDX working group may select a given report to publish on the main SPDX website (spdx.org).

Tech Report Publication Checklist

1. For consideration author(s) need to publish their work under one of the following Creative Common Licenses:
   • Attribution-NoDerivs CC BY-ND - This license allows for redistribution, commercial and non-commercial, as long as it is passed along unchanged and in whole, with credit to you. See:
   • Attribution CC BY - This license lets others distribute, remix, tweak, and build upon your work, even commercially, as long as they credit you for the original creation. See:
   • Attribution-ShareAlike CC BY-SA - This license lets others remix, tweak, and build upon your work even for commercial purposes, as long as they credit you and license their new creations under the identical terms. See:
2. Author(s) should prepare an abstract submit it to: spdx-press@spdx.org.
3. The SPDX Business Working Group will review the abstract proposal at an upcoming reoccurring bi-weekly meeting.
4. The author(s) will be informed via email if their proposal was accepted or rejected. If accepted the author(s) will be given a deadline for final submission.
5. If the final draft is received by the designated deadline in .docx format, it will be reviewed in its entirety by at least two reviewers. It will either be accepted or sent back to the author(s) for revision. This process repeats itself until the report is either formally accepted by both reviewers, rejected by at least one reviewer or withdrawn by the author(s).
6. Once a report is accepted for publication:
   • The report will be assigned a unique tech report number (e.g., SPDX TR 2013-0004)
   • Formatted using the standard SPDX tech report template
   • Entered into the SPDX tech report database
   • Announcement is made to the SPDX general list about the reports availability along with the abstract and a link.
7. Periodically an SPDX working group may select certain reports for publication on the main website spdx.org.

Tech Report Peer Review Process

• At least one reviewer from each of the three working groups is assigned (technical, Legal and Business)
• Author(s) of the paper cannot be reviewers.
• The following criteria is used:
  • The content is relevant to the SPDX community
  • The content is easy to understand
  • No obvious grammar or spelling mistakes present
  • Appropriate disclaimers are included (e.g., not legal advice, not opinions of the SPDX project or the Linux Foundation)
  • All the major sections of the standard report template have been included.

Tech Report Queue

TR #	Topic	Status	Who	Date Submitted	Comments
	File License Tagging Best Practices	Seeking Proposal		2013-10-03
	Generating SPDX Data Best Practices	Seeking Proposal		2013-10-03
2013-0001	Benefits of Boolean Expressions for Representing Licensing	Under Review	Mark Gisi	2013-10-10	Position Paper
	The Important Distinction between a License and a File License Notice	Under Review	Mark Gisi	2013-10-11	Position Paper

For Assistance

If you would like to learn more about the SPDX Tech Publication program, provide feedback on the current process or make recommendation on how to improve the process contact:

Mark Gisi

Mark.Gisi @ WindRiver.com

(510) 749-2016