Technical Team/Old/Sandbox for Sharing Examples/How to Handle Licenses in SPDX

Handling of Licenses IDs (Short names)

1. Fedora builds versions into the short name, but it is done in a non-standardized way that seems to vary from license to license, eg

2. Debian proposes a standard way – “license name-version”, eg

3. Both Fedora and Debian also use standard way to deal with the “and later” version options by using a “+”, eg

4. Suggested Solution for SPDX

I believe we should have a standard way to handle versions for SPDX. I would suggest going with the Debian approach or something similar. This would entail slightly modifying the Fedora short names where they do not follow the standard
I’m not sure if there is some reason why Fedora hasn’t standardized this.

Handling of “standard” exceptions is different

Fedora just uses a term that is “with exceptions” They don’t tell you which exceptions. The result is that a short name “GPLv3 with exceptions” is used for both the classpath and font exceptions. This seems to create ambiguity.
Debian proposes naming the common exception – with the following syntax

3. Suggested Solution for SPDX

I believe we should use the Debian approach for common “approved” exceptions such as the 2 mentioned for GPL

Spaces in short name

3. Suggested Solution for SPDX

I would ask the technical people if this will be problematic having spaces when we want to automatically parse these files.

Handling of multiple licenses

Both Fedora and Debian use “ands” and “ors” when there are multiple licenses associated with a pkg.

“and” when you must comply with the terms of all the licenses because parts of the package or file are under difference licenses
- artistic-1 and gpl-2
- “or” when you get to choose a license
  - artistic-1 or gpl-2

2. Both Fedora and Debian address the combining of ors and ands.

- Use parentheses when needed
- (artistic-1 or gpl-2) and lgpl=1.1
- “and” takes precedence
- GPL-2+ with font exception

3. Suggested Solution for SPDX

Handling of license variations

There are several licenses that have “variations”. MIT and BSD are examples of this. These situations are handled differently by Fedora and Debian.
Fedora

For MIT, Fedora treats a bunch of the MIT variations as “functionally equivalent” and uses the short name “MIT” to refer to all of them. They have a page listing all of the MIT variants and the actual text. <a href="https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Licensing/MIT">https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Licensing/MIT</a>
For BSD, Fedora seems to have different short names for each of the variants, eg
- BSD License (original) = short name “BSD with advertising”
- BSD License (no advertising) which is a 3 clause version and BSD License (two clause) both = short name of “BSD”
- BSD Protection License = short name of “BSD Protection”
- Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences BSD = “AMPAS BSD”

For MIT, Debian says that it is “problematic” and hasn’t addressed it . They have no short name for MIT yet.
For BSD, Debian has a short name for BSD, but it’s unclear how the variants are handled

This one is a little complicated. I think for any situation where we have different variants of a license, they should have different short names. Fedora has done this to some extent, but in some cases (like BSD 2 and 3-clause) they have combined it to use one short name. This would require us to stray from the short names of Fedora.
The other question is what do you do with “other” variants that don’t have a unique short name. Some people use “BSD-like” or terms such as that. I know some people don’t like that. It seems that for know the most accurate approach would be either to give a variant it’s own short name, or tag it as an “Other” license.

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