I'm helping Behan Webster's E-ALE project properly describe and document the license of their project in their repository. (E-ALE is a large tutorial project -- with materials pulled together from various sources -- and they are primarily licensed under various versions of CC BY-SA.)
Of course, being a good SPDX citizen, I was going to use SPDX identifiers where appropriate to describe the licenses. But I'd never looked closely (before today) at the identifiers available for CC licenses in SPDX. I noticed two key problems when I did: * To describe the pre-4.0 versions of CC BY-SA, there are only identifiers for the "Unported" versions. So, the SPDX identifier cannot actually be used to replace situations where someone, say, has used the "CC BY-SA 3.0 United States" license. * The Full Names of the licenses on https://spdx.org/licenses/ are incomplete. Most say something like: "Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike <VERSION>" But that's not the full name of the license according to CC. I therefore suggest two changes to the SPDX License List: * Change existing Full Names to: "Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike 4.0 International" for the 4.0 version and, "Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike <VERSION> Unported" for the older ones. It seems that would be an uncontroversial change -- it just involves adding "International" and "Unported" into the Full Name field. Does anyone have an argument why that *shouldn't* be done? * It *would* surely be controversial to add *every* version of *every* jurisdiction-specific CC license in the SPDX license list. Instead of suggesting that, for the moment I suggest that "-Unported" should be added to identifier for the pre-4.0 ones (i.e., "CC-BY-SA-3.0" becomes "CC-BY-SA-3.0-Unported") so that no is confused by this situation. -- Bradley M. Kuhn Distinguished Technologist of Software Freedom Conservancy ======================================================================== Become a Conservancy Supporter today: https://sfconservancy.org/supporter _______________________________________________ Spdx-legal mailing list Spdx-legal@lists.spdx.org https://lists.spdx.org/mailman/listinfo/spdx-legal
