Technical Team/Minutes/2014-10-28

October 28, 2014

Attendees

• Gary O'Neall
• Bill Schineller
• Kate Stewart
• Mark Gisi
• Kirsten Newcomer
• Scott Sterling
• Jack Manbeck

Agenda

• License Expression Language parsing - spanning multiple lines
• File Tagging follow-up

License Expression Language

Need a way to have license expression language span multiple 4 possible approaches

• Use parenthesis (like today)
• Have continuation characters
• Use begin/end text tags
• Restrict to single line

Agree to use a parenthesis but only require it around the outside expression. e.g.:

• LGPL-2.1 is OK since it is only a single license ID
• (LGPL-2.1 AND APACHE-2.0) is OK
• LGPL-2.1 AND APACHE-2.0 is NOT OK (needs parenthesis as delimiters)
• (LGPL-2.1 AND APACHE-2.0 OR APACHE 1.1) is OK (will use the operator precedence to determine expression)

File Tagging in Binaries

• Bill followed up on Binary inclusion of tags by declaring a string variable
  • Seemed OK, with caveats
    • Compilers may compile it out if the string is not referenced
    • Some may not want it due to the size of the binaries
• Kate followed up with Ed W.
  • Ed suggested a standardized Macro for C and C++
  • Other considerations regarding linking
• Agree that the suggestion is valuable, but may not be ready to be put in the spec. proper
• Separate decisions on including the comments in the source that indicates the license
• Agree separate document but publish it at the same time and have the separate document refer back to the SPDX dpecification