Legal Team/Current Projects and Issues

LAST UPDATED: 3 Jan 2014

SPDX Legal Team projects for 2014

License Matching Guidelines - implement markup

owner: Jilayne

• create appropriate markup files for all licenses on current list (Jilayne doing first pass)
• discuss any issues that arise on first call or two of 2014 with goal of releasing SPDX License List next version with this task completed by end of January.

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

• 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
• work in progress

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)

License Expression Review & GPL exceptions

owner: Mark Gisi & Tom Vidal

• Review of how SPDX spec deals with expressing various licensing scenarios in totality; e.g. using "and" and "or" for conjunctive and disjunctive license; how short identifiers play into this; revisit "or later" / "only" version issue and license exceptions
• We don't have all or the GPL exceptions - need to add to SPDX-LL. 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?)

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. zlib/ libpng license clarification
3. 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 Ref short identifiers

better way to identify licenses not on SPDX-LL (spec issue) or to reference other external license list that have greater set of licenses than SPDX-LL

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?