Legal Team/Minutes/2013-12-05

Attendees

• Jilayne Lovejoy
• Dennis Clark
• Zac White
• Paul Madick
• Phil Odence
• Tom Vidal
• Mark Gisi

Agenda

1) what on the plate?

• Fedora List and CC v4 licenses to add - Dennis to update table
• GPL exceptions and Mark's modifiers - seems like this will be on hold until January
• call schedule:
  • call on 19th a go and will only do Fedora list on that call - Zac to update Google Drive doc to assign more licenses to review for that call
  • no call on Jan 2nd and will pick up for 2014 on Jan 16

2) Creative Commons v4 licenses - request to add to SPDX License List

• there are 6 in the family; CC0 was not updated, but may be updated in 2014, so something to watch for
• no one on call had had a chance to look at new licenses yet, will probably add, but want to do full diligence and make sure we have reviewed - pick up on call on 19th

3) update on exception modifiers for License List (and special meeting) from Mark G.

• has created wiki page on SPDX site to describe the scenario, description of problem, and use cases (and include link to Tom's GPL exceptions)
• Mark will send link to limited people first for feedback and then send for general feedback;
• hope to have more people look at it and think about it before call, which will be scheduled sometime in January - findings will be recorded on this page and then recommendations from call made to Tech and Legal teams
• (more discussion related to this and GPL exceptions as well below)

4) GPL Exceptions list update (Tom V. w/help from Mark G.)

• process overview from Tom: started searching for exceptions with intention to capture "everything." found that there are many, many, many...
  • list is as exhaustive as it could be, but could probably find more b/c lots of tool developers have created new ones to use with their tools
  • has not done comparison among text to see if some are similar text with just different names
• Mark and Tom discussed that because there is such proliferation that maybe SPDX-LL goal shouldn't be capturing all exceptions, but to indicate with a symbol whether there is an exception (without specific list)
  • for example, "with" would be the operator and then capture actual text in License Ref --> this is more of a solution. this could be more pragmatic in terms of review process - people know GPLv2, but probably don't "know" the exceptions, so having the text for the exception alone in a LicenseRef field makes it easier to review that bit in particular
  • more thought on how to capture within spec - LicenseRef or a new field in spec?
  • would we need a new part of the list to list the exceptions for the very common ones which would capture the text of the exception? possible issue of having short identifiers for exceptions is that unlike licenses that usually have a steward, exceptions don't necessarily have this. then there is issue of some exceptions applying to various versions of licenses and some being version specific
• balance of keeping value of list via consistency and accuracy with thoroughness; should license list be "pure" licenses - as in well-defined things? exceptions are not well-defined things
• for now, just trying to capture list of exceptions
• need to also address specific situation with GPL-3.0 allowing extra terms

5) Fedora list - go through next set of licenses - Zac -- ran out of time, will pick up on this on the 19th

Tasks for next call

1. give Mark feedback on new wiki page
2. look over Creative Commons version 4 licenses
3. review next set of Fedora licenses (see green highlighting)