Hi Yenri - Very good points - some responses below

 

Gary

 

From: Henri Yandell [mailto:[email protected]] 
Sent: Thursday, January 14, 2016 7:07 PM
To: Gary O'Neall
Cc: [email protected]
Subject: Re: Machine representation of deprecated licenses

 

Few ponderings:

 

* Is there any leeway for confusion as to what deprecated means with a license? 
  I take it to mean 'we, license authors, don't believe it should be used for 
new works'.

[Gary] We probably do need to more precisely define this.  My interpretation is 
that the SPDX listed license should not be used for new SPDX documents or other 
references to the license list, usually due to a better way of expressing the 
same license (e.g. a license expression can be used to express was used to be 
documented as a separate license).  I don't interpret the meaning to be that 
license authors prefer a new license to be used (although that is a legitimate 
use case to be supported).  

* Is there a more general notion of guidance here?  
<guidance>deprecated</guidance>  or <guidance>draft</guidance> etc - not sure 
if there are other possibilities.

[Gary] Although I like the idea of generalizing the term - the primary use case 
is to make it easy for tools to filter which is easiest if there is a specific 
tag for deprecated, so I'm leaning to keeping the more specific tag.  lf we did 
want to have a more general term, I would suggest "status" (similar to RDF 
term_status which may be deprecated, stable, or unstable).

* Sometimes a best practice when deprecating is to point to what folk should 
use.  deprecated: Apache 1.1, use-instead: Apache 2.0; might be worth 
supporting if the data supports it. The first set of deprecated licenses I can 
think of all have successors, but I imagine there will be ones which don't have 
a specific successor.

[Gary] I like this idea - we could include another tag to denote this.  This is 
in the notes today, but perhaps we could add a specific tag.  One challenge is 
the "use instead" would be a license expression, not a license ID, so we need 
to be careful how we define the range of the "use-instead" term. 

 

Hen

 

 

On Thu, Jan 14, 2016 at 12:14 PM, Gary O'Neall <[email protected]> wrote:

Greetings all - 

I would like to add a mechanism for representing listed licenses that have been 
marked as deprecated in the JSON and RDFa formats for licenses on the 
spdx.org/licenses website.

 

My proposal is to add a property "spdx:deprecated" in the RDFa and just 
"deprecated" in the JSON with a boolean value of true or false.  It would be 
treated as optional with a default value of false.

 

This should be backwards compatible since it is an addition of an optional 
field.

 

Two questions - any objections to this proposal?

- where should we document this? We could add it in the Other License 
Information section (currently number 5), although, I think it would only 
logically apply to the listed license.  We do not have a separate section for 
Other Licensing information".

 

Let me know what you think and if you would like to add it to one of the future 
tech calls to discuss.


Thanks,

Gary

 

-------------------------------------------------

Gary O'Neall

Principal Consultant

Source Auditor Inc.

Mobile: 408.805.0586

Email: [email protected]

 


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