Legal Team/Old/License Template Issues

paragraph rearrangement

resolved

The consensus was that this is outside the scope of templatization.

Whitespace normalization

resolved

How to deal with whitespace repeation and newlines vs space vs tab

1. replace all whitespace characters with SPACE
2. collapse repeated spaces to one space character

Replaceable parts

Dealing with copyright owner, copyright year, etc.

Some sort of demarcation of replaceable elements in a license. These would be limited to a discrete list of supported element types. For example, year and copyright holder.

We could allow replaceable elements to be used in any license text at the risk of colliding with non-template parts of the license text. Alternatively, we could explicitly indicate that the license text of a particular licenses has replaceable elements. An explicit indication of templatization would allow us to simply not use replaceable elements for licenses which would have collisions. However, it would prevent us from templatizing licenses that would have collisions

Perhaps an esoteric template syntax would allow us to avoid the collision issue. Maybe something like "{{{YEAR}}}"?

Section/bullet numbering/lettering

What if in one license a list has a,b,c and in another i,ii,iii?

this issue has not been explored

Different spellings of same word

color vs colour

Issue not dealt with. Perhaps a stemming algorithm of some sort?

Separate field

Is a separate field for the normalized/templated version of the license text necessary and desirable?

Normalization algorithm must be defined normatively in the spec.

Explicit field for normalized/templated version could be helpful as examples. Perhaps example of every standard license is unnecessary.