Legal Team/Minutes/2015-10-29

Attendees

Discussion on some of logistics of proposal:

question re: “enhanced format”, how generated? would be generated by tool b/c not maintainable by a human, would pull in other info, etc.
process: could probably automate adding some of tags from current scenario
conversion: automate a first pass of current license list to get tags, then some manual work
advantage of XML (versus current “custom” markup) is there is more XML use = more inclination for others to contribute to that end; this is probably the most compelling argument for moving to XML rather than some custom markup
all agreed that implementation needs to result in ONE “version” of license text that other “versions” could be generated from (e.g. human readable version, HTML, with markup)

Discussion on purpose:

purpose: original markup use-case was comparing two licenses, not to provide full license searching/matching information (e.g. a license detection database); some of the decision in early days to limit scope was a bandwidth issue - so, is this something SPDX wants to take on now?
current markup is not even enough for the basic use-case of comparing two licenses, so end up needing to patch and then maintain that anyway
SPDX being a canonical database of licenses - this is a natural place to create and store this further information re: matching, have all the information in one place - everyone pretty much agreed on this point

how will this be maintained?

separate workgroup to consider further? Agreed the “workgroup” is the people on this call, no need to separate out. need to know we want to move forward, then tech team can dive into specifics of proposal and implementation

3 areas of change:

change in format of markup from “unique” to XML - no resistance to this
additional tags, some necessary for some of these new use cases - we knew we could use more all along, and additional tags align with current written matching guideline, so no real resistance here
switching from using spreadsheet to just XML text files; columns in spreadsheet now would have to be converted into new fields in XML file; then would have ONE file per license/exception (instead of list of all, plus file for actual license text)

could generate a spreadsheet from that, if that’s helpful for people to still have
spreadsheet does not lend itself to generating diffs; prone to human error
all-XML may be harder (for Jilayne) to maintain?
but all-XML will be more conducive to help from others

next steps:

Resolve the UberConference 10 people limit, which was a big problem today since key people were not able to participate in the meeting.
Kate will bring up on tech calls in meantime so tech team can mull over specifics of current proposal (and make sure others who couldn't join this call are included, especially Sam Ellis and FOSSology folks)
we will have another joint call btw legal and tech team either on: (will resolve Uber conference 10 people limit before then!!
- Dec 8th tech team time or
- Dec 10 or tech team on 8th