I agree that cryptic is best. If we all we recognize that using 'SPDX-License-Identifier' means this is what the file is licensed under do we really need to be any more explicit? Do we really still require a license header? If we did need to be more explicit I would think along the lines of 'SPDX-File-LicensedAs' to try and keep it simple. The more information link that David suggest sis interesting. Would that field and the license identifier be equivalent to a license header (since people seem to be nervous about losing the headers)?
There are some limitations to the current approach. 1. You can only use this for licenses that are on the SPDX license list. It might be interesting to have further meta tags like BEGIN and END license in those cases where someone has created their own (or conversely we add everything to the list.. Jilayne groans :)). 2. We can't capture license exceptions written into the source. Might be nice to add delimiters for that as well. I know for the well formed stuff like that from the FSF we are probably okay but here are lots of other examples in the wild and we still use that software. 3. Likely lots more we could capture. Windriver did an example markup of busybox to try and capture license information. Would be good to study that as well. Lots of things that could be added going forward. My thinking was to start small with this and then see it grow. We likely can't call this a standard but we could be thinking of that in the future if it gets wide adoption. Jack -----Original Message----- From: spdx-legal-boun...@lists.spdx.org [mailto:spdx-legal-boun...@lists.spdx.org] On Behalf Of Wheeler, David A Sent: Thursday, October 03, 2013 2:54 PM To: dmg; Lamons, Scott (Open Source Program Office) Cc: spdx-t...@lists.spdx.org; SPDX-biz; SPDX-legal Subject: RE: meta-tag page Dmg: > Following this rational, would it be possible to recommend something in the > line of: > BEGIN_LICENSE > This file is licensed under the <SPDX_LICENSE_IDENTIFIER> For more > information see URL-TO-SPDX-WEB-SITE-WITH-iNFO END_LICENSE that makes > three things explicit: > > * It says where the license info in -file is (BEGIN, END_LICENSE) > * It explicitly states the file is licensed under the given licence > * It says where to get more information to understand what it means. > Jack's way of doing it, by just naming the license feels too cryptic > to me if I am reading the header, and does not explicitly state it is > the license under which the file is made available to others >From a programmer's perspective I think the "cryptic" approach is FAR >superior. There are lots of tools that can quickly examine files and return >text with the pattern "SPDX-License-Identifier: ", and other tools that can >trivially process the stuff after it. The above alternative is more work to >process, and humans don't like unnecessary work :-). If you want more boilerplate with the goal of enforceability, you might try a format that's trivial to process, e.g.: SPDX-License-Notice: This file is licensed under the following license(s): SPDX-License-Identifier: MIT SPDX-License-More-Information: http://wiki.spdx.org/ --- David A. Wheeler _______________________________________________ Spdx-legal mailing list Spdx-legal@lists.spdx.org https://lists.spdx.org/mailman/listinfo/spdx-legal _______________________________________________ Spdx-legal mailing list Spdx-legal@lists.spdx.org https://lists.spdx.org/mailman/listinfo/spdx-legal
