Legal Team/Minutes/2015-03-05

Attendees

• Dennis Clark, nexB
• Alan Tse, Western Digital
• Sam Ellis, ARM
• Mark Gisi, Wind River
• Tom Vidal, Abrams Garfinkel Margolis Bergson, LLP

Agenda

1) Collab Summit - quick update: See links here to various updates, including slides from the 2.0 update that Kate, Gary, and Jack gave:http://spdx.org/SPDX-specifications/spdx-version-2.0

2) 2.0 status update, overall: General meeting rescheduled to next Thursday, March 12 and will focus on discussing rc3 with 2.0 going live a couple weeks after that (general plan)

3) 2.0 status update for SPDX License List: we looked over some of the pages and identified some thing that can be improved for the official 2.0 release:

• bold "License Expression Syntax" link so it stands out more
• implement alternating colors in the license list and exceptions tables (because they currently look very "80s")
• standard headers need cleaning up: formatting is not coming through (no line breaks) and some {{}} leftover
• add a column in the master spreadsheet indicating which license .txt files include markup (for matching guidelines) - not sure if we need to track this, but better to have the info than not and wish we did later
• when 2.0 goes live, make sure that all licenses and exceptions display and don't download (webpage configuration issue - check with Gary and LF folks on this)

4) Things to consider or revisit post-2.0:

• Disjunctive license notices: should we capture common ones somehow? Is the license expression syntax enough to express these - what about when the notice includes some other info? How does one capture that, should we accommodate separately or maybe develop suggestions, examples, or best practices? See examples Sam sent, such as http://dev.perl.org/licenses/ or https://netbeans.org/about/legal/license.html
• still need to look at some of the conjunctive licenses that are on license list and decide whether to break apart or leave as is
• providing a recommended header for licenses that don't have a standard header; something SPDX could do as a way to encourage more consistency. dovetails with idea of using short identifiers, but Mark's idea here is to provide a bit more than that.
• add markup for other common license variations

Action Item for Everyone: Look over the license list web pages, related pages in spec, Git repository, etc. and provide feedback and attend the general meeting next week!!! :)