General Meeting/Minutes/2017-10-05

• Attendance: 11
• Lead by Phil Odence
• Minutes of Sept meeting approved

Guest Presentation - Alexander Lisianoi

• Background
  • Working on masters in Technical University of Vienna
• Project
  • Turning Python Code into Javascript
    • Pooling PY and License expression
    • Libraries that are self contained
    • Initially looked easy
  • Results
    • It works!
  • How it went
    • Long list of tools available, so choosing a tool is the first step
      • Brython, Batavia, Transcript
      • Brython can read in pure Python
      • Bytavia uses Python byte code
      • Transcript actually translates to javacode, so he picked that one
        • Downside is that it doesn’t handle every Python capability
    • Encountered a lot of bizarre results
      • And complained a fair amount
      • Tricky to know what goes wrong; have to debug both in parallel
      • Errors can be subtle
      • How things are compared differs between languages
  • The resulting tool
    • You can parse, but it can be broken
  • Value of the work
    • Javascript is very commonly used for front ends these days
    • You don’t want to have to support two technologies for front and back end
    • This allows leveraging the backend scripts for building front end
    • Valuable to tool developers using JS and to development communities
    • As a side-effect of the work, we Alexander helped

Tech Team Report - Kate/Gary

• Spec
  • All on GItHub now
• Last few meetings have been focused on
  • FSF proposal
    • Supporting legal team on expanding license expression language
  • Testing work from Jack
    • Tool testing cases
      • Scanners for locating license language
      • License language matchers (using matching guidelines)
    • Also testing license list generator
      • Which requires test cases as well
    • Looking at creating a repo for all test cases
      • Two tool types
      • License list gen
    • Will be community based so folks can contribute cases
• Preview
  • Looks like there will be a new tool contribution from an LF member
  • A tool to create a summary
    • Input SPDX tag value; output easy to read/intrerpret format

• LinuxCon Europe
  • There will be a meeting for those creating tools
  • New testing work with be on the agenda

Legal Team Report - Jilayne/Paul

• FSF Proposal
  • For how the GPL version is represented
  • Questions about new operators, default
  • Generated a large meeting with tech folks
    • Lively discussion
    • Did not reach resolution
  • FSF has come back with another proposal
    • Technical challenges
    • Difference of opinion, particularly for case where
    • Part of the issue is that FSF is focused on just the identifiers vs. how we use with SPDX
      • License does not specify “or later” or “only”
      • How do we represent without representing legal judgment
      • Fundamentally there are different opinions on what it means when there is no specification
      • Very important to FSF (including Richard Stallman)

Outreach Team Report - Jack

• Mostly license test file work as described above

Attendees

• Phil Odence, Black Duck
• Kate Stewart, Linux Foundation
• Alexander Lisianoi, Technical University of Vienna
• Matthew Crawford, ARM
• Matija Suklje, FSFE
• Steve Winslow, Linux Foundation
• Mike Dolan, Linux Foundation
• Jack Manbeck, TI
• Michael Herzog- nexB
• Gary O’Neall, SourceAuditor
• Paul Madick, Dimension Data