Legal Team/Minutes/2019-03-21

Attendees

• Mark Atwood
• Brad Edmondson
• Steve Winslow
• John Horan
• Jilayne Lovejoy
• Gary O’Neall
• Paul Madick
• Kate Stewart

Agenda

1) go through outstanding issues for 3.5 release and update:

• two licenses that had some aspect of being non-commercial were submitted, CC license seems to be blessed but there is a warning the comments by Mike L on the many ported CC licenses (e.g. where do we draw line? It would be helpful to have some input from CC on what they consider to be canonical licenses)
• this also touched upon bigger issues of adding more licenses generally and how strict on open source should we be? This, in turn, then touches upon the issue of having only a handful of volunteers who do actual work (most notably, generating the XML files, PRs, comments on issues, etc.) of adding a license. If we decided to be more lenient on what goes on list, the amount of work is not scalable (it's not even really do-able now)
  • Currently, it takes probably about half hour to an hour to do one license
  • We can improve tooling to some degree, but will always need human review.
  • Suggestion to change process such that * SPDX legal team makes decision, but actually building of files to submit has to be done by submitter or other community members interested in having license on list; this way more people have to be involved
• other note on XML markup: where copyright notice and names are in text and replaceable - can have either specific or generic as the text that appears / exemplar text b/c doesn’t matter for matching purposes
• submit issues for online tooling for GSoC students: Gary and team are asking them to work on small issues as part selection process, so helpful to have smaller things to point them to
• various issues for 3.5 assigned and plan for who is going to see which issues/PRs to end. Aim to have all tied up by next Friday, Mar 29 then do actual release on April 1