On Tue, Nov 21, 2017 at 08:10:02AM -0700, J Lovejoy wrote: > Just a reminder to all: when someone places a copy of the GPL, > version 2 alongside source code files this does not make the > licensing ambiguous; clearly there is a valid license… > > Any scenario you could interpret, we have a way to express that > currently and would still under the proposal. > > … https://opensource.com/article/17/11/avoiding-gpl-confusion …
I think a copy of the GPL alongside source code (e.g. [1]) is ambiguous. And the article you link mentions “confusion” in the URL, “foggy” in the title, and “ambiguity” in the subtitle. I agree that you can, like Fedora, decide that you are comfortable enough with one interpretation. But I think Gary has volunteered himself for the “I'd write partially-concluded license expressions, but there's no syntax for it yet” camp [2]. The FSF itself is unwilling to commit to a public position on this situtation (as far as I'm aware). So I think there is likely to be a substantial set of license-expression authors who are unwilling to claim a complete conclusion. Is this point still under contention? If we accept a substantial set of partial-concluders, the SPDX needs to decide what to suggest to them. Folks using SPDX documents can already use comment sections, but those are unstructured [3]. And folks using bare license expressions obviously don't have access to the SPDX-document comment field. We can tell them: a. That they cannot pass the partial conclusion along, and can only bail out with NOASSERTION (I've filed [4] to add that to license expressions). b. That they can pass the partial conclusion along, using: i. an AMBIGUOUS[-VERSION] operator, or ii. an OR-MAYBE operator, as discussed in [5]. I see no upside to (a), but I'm not an SPDX maintainer. I strongly prefer b.ii to b.i, as discussed in [5]. The OR-MAYBE operator (b.ii) is completely independent of how the or-later business shakes out. The AMBIGUOUS[-VERSION] operator (b.i) overlaps slightly, because you'd have to choose which GPL short identifier to use with AMBIGUOUS-VERSION. If (b.i) has no surviving supportors, we don't have to worry about that at all. Cheers, Trevor [1]: https://github.com/javierwilson/tonto/tree/75be0678be565872cbe7b99d5af4a1946393ee77 [2]: https://lists.spdx.org/pipermail/spdx-legal/2017-November/002317.html Subject: Re: only/or later and the goals of SPDX Date: Message-ID: <20171109195414.ga11...@valgrind.us> [3]: https://lists.spdx.org/pipermail/spdx-legal/2017-October/002259.html Subject: Re: only/or later and the goals of SPDX Date: Wed, 11 Oct 2017 23:12:39 -0700 Message-ID: <20171012061239.ga11...@valgrind.tremily.us> [4]: https://github.com/spdx/spdx-spec/issues/50 [5]: Subject: Re: only/or later and the goals of SPDX Date: Thu, 12 Oct 2017 10:31:47 -0700 Message-ID: <20171012173147.gd11...@valgrind.tremily.us> -- 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
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