As a copyleft enforcement expert, I'll comment on this part:
J Lovejoy wrote:
> This begs the question as to what if someone used Exhibit A and identified
> GPL-2.0+, for example, but the Program was not combined with other material
> made available under GPL-2.0+?
...
> I think that becomes an enforcement issue of the license which may have
> some problems,
I am perhaps missing a legal subtlety of the EPL-2.0-revised [0], but I
suspect that when Exhibit A is exercised by the Initial Contributor, it
causes a similar situation to the GPLv2-or-later scenario that we've been
studying in separate threads of discussion lately.
I've dealt with a few enforcement actions where someone took GPLv2-or-later
code, violated, but *did not* incorporate any code licensed under GPLv3-only
and/or GPLv3-or-later.
In those cases, ultimately the violator argues whether they meant to be
distributing under GPLv2 or GPLv3. (In the cases I've dealt with, they
always pick GPLv3 because its termination provisions are extensively more
violator-friendly, particularly if the violation was merely an oversight.)
I can't imagine exercising of Exhibit A -- about which I agree with you would
likely yield "EPL-2.0-revised OR GPLv2-or-later" -- would operate any
differently in practice: a violator would be able to decide if they wished to
argue the license they were violating was EPL-2.0, GPLv2 or GPLv3 at the time
a copyright holder began an enforcement action. And, in particular, the
violator could surely delay that choice until an enforcement action by the
copyright holder began. And, in a case where the action taken by the
violator would violate GPL but not EPL-2.0-revised, presumably they would
argue they always intended to distribute under EPL-2.0-revised.
As a side point, I think things would play out the same way with Mozilla's
tri-license disjunction, too.
> but that is a separate discussion and not relevant to SPDX
> and SPDX identifiers.
I really it's probably OT to continue this subthread further, but I'd
be very interested to hear why you think Exhibit A causes enforcement
problems, Jilayne.
[0] I'm calling EPL-2.0-revised because there are two documents named EPL-2.0
in the wild, and the EPL-2.0-original was discussed on this list as well.
--
Bradley M. Kuhn
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