Hi Wolfgang,
The "AND" situation would occur if you have a file which contains code from
two or more different sources using two or more different licenses. In that
case, I believe you would need to satisfy the obligations of all licenses
(note: I'm not a lawyer so I am not proposing or providing a legal
interpretation). Hopefully there is no conflict between the license
obligations.
The "OR" would imply a choice as you mentioned below.
When we were working on the 1.0 SPDX specification, we discussed various
licensing situations and came up with a syntax that could capture both
conjunctive license sets (AND's) and disjunctive license sets (OR's) as well
as arbitrarily complex combinations of conjunctive and disjunctive license
sets. I suggest we leverage the same spec for the license ids tagged in
source fields.
Below is an excerpt from the spec:
---
For a license set, when there is a choice between licenses ("disjunctive
license"), they should be separated with "or" and enclosed in parentheses.
When multiple licenses apply ("conjunctive license"), they should be
separated with an "and" and enclosed in parentheses. Example: (LGPL-2.1 or
MPL-1.1).
---
We were also concerned about the difficulty in parsing the strings. We came
up with enclosing them in parenthesis to aid in accurate and unambiguous
parsing. For example, (LGPL-2.1 and (MPL-1.1 or BSD-3-Clause)) would
describe the licensing for a file which contains code from an LGPL 2.1
package and code from a package licensed under a choice of MPL-1.1 or
BSD-3-Clause.
Gary
-----Original Message-----
From: spdx-biz-boun...@lists.spdx.org
[mailto:spdx-biz-boun...@lists.spdx.org] On Behalf Of Wolfgang Denk
Sent: Sunday, October 06, 2013 11:58 AM
To: Wheeler, David A
Cc: SPDX-legal; spdx-tech@lists.spdx.org; SPDX-biz; d...@uvic.ca
Subject: Re: meta-tag page - part II
Dear David,
In message <9f8e44bc27e22046b84ec1b9364c66a1a8054aa...@exch07-4850.ida.org>
you wrote:
>
> SPDX-License-Identifier: LGPL-2.1 OR MPL-1.1
...
> In general, we all want both simplicity (so people will USE it) and
> expressiveness (so it can be USEFUL). The trick is getting there...
I dislike this idea. Combining alternative liceses (where the user can
chose any of them) by anyhting alse but an "OR" does not make sense. I
cannot imagine how you woudl apply two licesnese (like, say, GPL and BSD)
simultaneously.
Also, in the interest of easy processing of the license tags, I wouls like
to propse that multiple licenses in a list are separated by white space only
- no "OR", no commas, nor any other artificial delimiters that will only
make parsing the information more difficult.
Best regards,
Wolfgang Denk
--
DENX Software Engineering GmbH, MD: Wolfgang Denk & Detlev Zundel
HRB 165235 Munich, Office: Kirchenstr.5, D-82194 Groebenzell, Germany
Phone: (+49)-8142-66989-10 Fax: (+49)-8142-66989-80 Email: w...@denx.de Every
revolutionary idea - in science, politics, art, or whatever - evokes three
stages of reaction in a hearer:
1. It is completely impossible - don't waste my time.
2. It is possible, but it is not worth doing.
3. I said it was a good idea all along.
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