General Meeting/Minutes/2017-07-06

Guest Presentation - Anna Buhman

Goals: Integrate GitHub with SPDX
- Auto Generation
- And kept up to date
- Therefore easier to use
Uses
- Repo admin sets up
- Or non admin or someone outside could generate as well
- Perhaps on a portion of the code
How it works
- Scans using an open source scanner with every change
- Creates doc and a pull request for updated doc which human must approve
  - anticipates needing some human modifications
- Above is working today
Future modifications
- Rather than replacing, combing with old version to retain human mods
- Email notification of new docs
- User-selectable license scanner
Project comments
- Learning lots about different kinds of software
  - Example, learning about controlling GitHub with Python code
- SPDX seemed very complicated at first
- But understanding licensing she understands the requirements
- Work so far is on GitHub in the SPDX area; Wiki too
Questions:
- How to keep from overwriting human modifications?
  - Compare section by section and default to original giving a human the choice
- When will a demo be available?
  - Maybe on a future call

Spec source is now on GitHub, versioned, etc,
- Big thanks to Thomas Steenbergen
- Working out permissions/process modifications
- Looking at how to link to from spdx.org
Have been working through the topics for the next rev
Tooling
- Summer of Code students have been giving updates
  - Gitter account set up wth lots of good conversations
  - Great progress overall

Good last few calls
XML Format
- Gary set up a we to view previews
- Down to last few files
Discussion about Linus’ note about GPL
- Linus tried to clarify what it applied to our not
  - explicit about user space not subject to being a derivative work
- Not calling it a license exception, per se, but will likely be treated as we treat exceptions
- Not a clear way to represent; working on that now
- There had been two versions, but that was cleaned up
Some chatter on mailing list about how we identify “only” as in GPL 2.0 Only
- Problem: We are explicit about “or later” but not about “only”
- Working with FSF who would prefer: GPL-2.0-Only
- Considering modifications to the expression language

Michael working on umbrella project page for Git
- Idea is to be an SPDX home for developers
Working on a write up of goals for tools etc.
- Kate working on it.