>> It's not the only justification. Having an ‘only’ operator also lets you >> give a very clear >> license expression (e.g. ‘GPL-2.0 only’) for grants like: >> >> This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify >> it under the terms of the GNU General Public License version 2 as >> published by the Free Software Foundation.
GNU General Public License version 2 = GPL-2.0. The "only" operator is not need here. The example is similar to following addresses by: Apache-2.0. * Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the "License"); * you may not use this file except in compliance with the License. * You may obtain a copy of the License at: * http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0 * * Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software distributed * under the License is distributed on an "AS IS" BASIS, WITHOUT WARRANTIES * OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied. If the source file license is GPL-2.0 that currently means only one thing. GNU General Public License version 2. There is no confusion. I understand that this has been discussed at length but I not sure the problem is what people think it is. We need to find source code file notice examples that can't be expressed using the current license expression language in order to justify making changes. The above as it stands does not represent a problem. I am not saying there is no problem. I am trying to move away from the theoretical problem descriptions and find a collection of real world use cases that define the problem and that would help lead to a solution. - Mark -----Original Message----- From: W. Trevor King [mailto:wk...@tremily.us] Sent: Monday, September 11, 2017 12:18 PM To: Gisi, Mark Cc: J Lovejoy; Marc Jones; SPDX-legal Subject: Re: GPLv2 - Github example On Mon, Sep 11, 2017 at 07:04:57PM +0000, Gisi, Mark wrote: > >> With the ‘only’ operator proposal [1], this situation can be > >> represented by ‘CDDL-1.0 only’. > > … Finally this case can be elegantly handled with a LicenseRef… But you can't define a LicenseRef in sitations (like npm [1]) where the only thing you can set is a license expression and you don't have access to the broader SPDX spec. > That is, the example represents a rare edge case that does not present > a situation that can't be express with today's current constructs. > Therefore it does not represent a good example > (justification) for adding the "only" operator. It's not the only justification. Having an ‘only’ operator also lets you give a very clear license expression (e.g. ‘GPL-2.0 only’) for grants like: This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License version 2 as published by the Free Software Foundation. which is one of the goals listed in [2]. That's a distinct license expression from ‘GPL-2.0’ for cases like “I found this license text in a separate file, but no clear grant applying it to this project” which is the “GitHub example” that spawned this thread. Although as discussed in this thread, some SPDX authors and tools may feel uncomfortable making a concluded-license call in that case. However, I expect tools like licensee, which only look for stand-alone license files and ignore grant comments [3], will be concluding ‘GPL-2.0’ and similar, and having an explicit ‘only’ operator allows consumers to distinguish those ambiguous conclusions from an explicit ‘GPL-2.0+’ or ‘GPL-2.0 only’. Cheers, Trevor [1]: https://docs.npmjs.com/files/package.json#license [2]: https://wiki.spdx.org/view/Legal_Team/only-operator-proposal#Goals [3]: https://github.com/benbalter/licensee/blob/v9.2.0/docs/what-we-look-at.md#what-about-checking-every-single-file-for-a-copyright-header -- This email may be signed or encrypted with GnuPG (http://www.gnupg.org). For more information, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pretty_Good_Privacy _______________________________________________ Spdx-legal mailing list Spdx-legal@lists.spdx.org https://lists.spdx.org/mailman/listinfo/spdx-legal
