Hi all,

This is a reminder for our call tomorrow (Thursday) at the usual time: 
https://wiki.spdx.org/view/Legal_Team <https://wiki.spdx.org/view/Legal_Team>

Agenda is as follows:

1) only / or later clarification and proposal: 
Kate and I have discussed our last proposal (which was summarized here: 
https://wiki.spdx.org/view/Legal_Team/only-operator-proposal 
<https://wiki.spdx.org/view/Legal_Team/only-operator-proposal>) with Richard 
Stallman and John Sullivan as to concerns the FSF, as steward of the GNU 
licenses, had with that and how to mitigate. As a result, we came up with the 
following modified proposal to discuss on the first part of tomorrow’s call:

Proposal:

SPDX will incorporate modifiers (as described below) to be used with license 
identifiers (and expressions). The guidance from SPDX as to the use of the 
modifiers will be as follows:
        a) The modifiers can be used with any license identifier and we 
encourage people to use them where doing so provides clarity as needed.
        b) Specifically, with the GNU family of licenses, you MUST use one of 
the modifiers; use of the plain license identifier (e.g., “GPL-2.0”) will be 
considered an invalid license expression going forward. 
        GNU family of licenses = all versions of GPL, LGPL, AGPL, FDL (SPDX 
will list all license identifiers to be clear)

Modifiers:
There are two sets listed: one that involves a single character (to be 
consistent with existing +) and one that is more human-readable:

        + = "or later” - same meaning as now

        ? = “unclear version”   - this will be a new modifier to indicate there 
is a lack of clarity as to the license version regarding if any version, or 
later, or only applies, e.g., I found the text of GPLv2, but I’m not sure if 
it’s “only “ or “or later” because there is no other information.  
Need further input on the exact word to use here, i.e, “unclear” “maybe” 
“ambiguous"

        #  = "only" - this will be a new modifier to indicate ‘this version 
only’. 
Need further input as to one character configuration, if needed


I think this will provide a better path for backwards compatibility and moving 
people using old versions SPDX to use the current version, as use of GPL-2.0 
when validated against the current version will get a warning - thus allowing 
visibility and (hopefully) encouraging adoption of current version/use of 
modifiers as per above. 

Also, I think it will also prevent the need to make any kind of interpretation 
of other licenses with or later clauses, as it allows SPDX uses to use the 
modifiers as they see fit (or not) for such licenses. 

2) Progress update for next release / XML conversion, including:
- need to identify tasks and assign
- need to discuss EPL-2.0 Exhibit A / Secondary License 
- any other items as needed, from mailing list, etc.


Cheers,
Jilayne

SPDX Legal Team co-lead
opensou...@jilayne.com


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