> > By the bye, one thing I'd find useful, either inside or outside of SPDX, is > some > notion of correspondence of an FSF-approved license with a counterpart > OSI-approved, or SPDX-recognized, license.
to be clear - the FSF does not approve licenses, they identify whether FSF considered licenses free/libre. I think we will end up with the correspondence you describe when we add the FSF-libre-license field. :) > > To illustrate, consider the MIT license. There is no MIT license > steward; the de facto standard text (basically for historical reasons) > is that on the OSI website, https://opensource.org/licenses/MIT > > The FSF speaks of a license it calls the X11 license as being a free > software license and says that this is sometimes called the MIT > license (a label the FSF has long considered confusing or > misleading). However, the license pointed to by the FSF is not > textually identical to the OSI MIT license and also does not match the > SPDX license "MIT", but does match the SPDX license "X11”. MIT on SPDX and OSI match, as they should. X11 is MIT with an advertising clause (and I just caught a typo in the notes field on that topic - will fix that now!) If OSI considers X11 OSI-approved as well, that would be good to know, but I’ve never been told this and have always understood OSI approval to track on the text of the license on the OSI website (which means such license text also shouldn’t change, at least without some good reason and notification) As for the issue you mention re: what FSF considers MIT or X11 or any other licenses - that will have to be worked out with the FSF once we match up the licenses from the FSF list to SPDX. > Today one can't justifiably say that the FSF and the OSI both approve the MIT > license as meeting the respective definitional licensing norms of > those organizations, even though everyone *knows* that's true. See comment above about FSF not approving licenses ;) WE are not going to reflect what “everyone *knows*” but what these orgs report - we can do no more than that. If FSF decides in the process of this work that it wants to specifically recognize MIT and X11 (in SPDX identifier-speak) as free/libre licenses - then great! And we can reflect that with the new field. Jilayne _______________________________________________ Spdx-legal mailing list Spdx-legal@lists.spdx.org https://lists.spdx.org/mailman/listinfo/spdx-legal
