2017-10-05¶

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Read-only copy of the SPDX wiki. The wiki is no longer active; its content has moved to https://github.com/spdx. Last edited 2017-10-05 by Podence.

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

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

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)

Categories: General, Minutes