Legal Team/Minutes/2016-08-18

Attendees

• Sam Ellis
• Gary O'Neall
• Brad Edmondson
• Sam Ellis
• Jilayne Lovejoy

Agenda

1) Went through all items in Github repo that were tagged "needs legal discussion" or "question", etc.

• discussed meaning of <optional> tag in terms of when to use it and what guidelines we use to make this call. Matching Guidelines 2.1.4 is starting point, explaining the omitable text means text marked as such can be considered a match if hte text indicated is present and matches OR the text indicated is missing altogether. Matching Guidelines 12 talks about extraneous text at the end of a license which may be omitable. This kind of text was not marked up in, so whether to use the optional tag now came up in a few licenses. We discussed the reality that just making a call as to whether the text is part of the license or not is a legal interpretation, but that sometimes it is clearly not part of the license and where it is questionalbe, then we will likely err on the side of caution and not mark it as optional.

2) Review timeline and to-do tasks (see: http://wiki.spdx.org/view/Legal_Team/Minutes/2016-07-21). Decided not to schedule another call next week. Hope to stay on track, get some work done via mailing list in next two weeks.