Legal Team/Minutes/2012-02-08

Attendees

• Paul Madick,
• Mark Gisi, WindRiver
• Peter Williams, OpenLogic
• Jilayne Lovejoy, OpenLogic
• Esteban Rockett, Motorola
• Tom Incorvia, MicroFocus
• Michael Herzog, NexB
• Kate Stewart, Canonical

License List Match Guidelines - pickup at #7 Copyright Notice guideline

see Legal_Team/License_List/License_Matching_Guidelines for updated guidelines. No more Word document.

• is the copyright notice "part" of the license?
  • yes in the case of BSD and MIT, i.e. is BSD 3-clause shows up multiple times with different copyright notices, we want it to match to BSD 3-clause
    • in this case, copytihgt notice not part of license in terms of matching
    • remove copyright notice from license text field in our license list and move it??
  • no in the case of Apache or GPL where there is a copyright notice for the license itself?
  • where someone leaves the <copyright holder> insertable text in the license - does that make it a "different" notice
  • if there is no copyright notice where there usually is one, is that a match?
• can we simply say ignore copyright notice, include example,
  • don't take out copyright notices in license text on license list
  • or different rules for different license? - hard for implementation
  • if a license has its own copyright notice (i.e. Apache 2.0) and its ignored would this be bad?
• → guideline for copyright notice, ignore, but then question is whether we then need to go through the entire license list and delineate where that begins and ends

• notice issue - the notice is not a license, in case of BSD, license is contained in the notice, but whereas GPL notice may be different forms and also may indicate "or later" or not - but still same GPL license (to discuss more in depth later)
• does spec differentiate b/w notice and copyright holder well enough? may need to be more specific about how we discuss copyright holders in spec
  • what about when there are different copyright holders for different licenses within a file
• → these issues to be further discussed at next meeting (items #8 and #9 on license list match guidelines page)

License List format issue

on last business call the issue of several license text being too long for the character limit in Excel then resulting in that license text missing in the html pages was discussed and how to remedy this so that all info was in one place. Need to have a downloadable (spreadsheet) format for people who want to download the license list for their own purposes. Eventually we will transition to the html pages being the "original" and have some kind of tool to generate a downloadable file, but in the meantime, the spreadsheet is the "original" and the html files are created from that.

Gary, Bill, and Jilayne had a call on Monday about various options. proposal to move the license text into separate text files named according to the short identifiers and then the spreadsheet would have a link to the text file. spreadsheet and text files would be one downloadable tar ball.

Update and discussion of this issues at legal meeting:

• should the separate files be .txt files or the html files? if html files, kind of creates circular situation
• to be discussed at general meeting tomorrow.