On Wed, May 11, 2016 at 11:56 PM, Wheeler, David A <dwhee...@ida.org> wrote: > In the Linux Foundation CII “best practices” badge effort I’m noticing an > interesting problem. Some projects have *different* license situations for > their source code and documentation, but there’s no simple way to express > that using SPDX License expressions.
Furthermore, there is common pattern to have CLI tools under the GPL, a library under the LGPL (and somtimes examples in the public domain or BSD-licensed. ) > Examples of projects where the license > isn’t easily expressed with SPDX expressions are: > > https://bestpractices.coreinfrastructure.org/projects/1 > > https://bestpractices.coreinfrastructure.org/projects/137 > > > > I propose adding a new construct: > > "(IF <Condition> THEN <License-Expression> [ELSE <License-Expression>])" to > License expressions. > > For starters, <Condition> can be: > > DOCUMENTATION = True if & only if (iff) documentation > > SOURCE = True if & only if (iff) source code > > > > So “Source code under MIT, everything else under CC-BY-3.0 or later” becomes > this license expression: > > "(IF SOURCE THEN MIT ELSE CC-BY-3.0+)". > > > > If there’s no “else” and the condition is false, it’d be interpreted as the > empty set of rights (“no rights”), so these would mean the same thing: > > "MIT OR (IF DOCUMENTATION THEN CC-BY-3.0+)" > > "(IF DOCUMENTATION THEN (MIT OR CC-BY-3.0+) ELSE MIT)" > > I imagine Condition could be beefed up to allow AND/OR/NOT, file matching, > jurisdiction matching, and comparisons with the current date (for timed > releases in the future). But that’s for a later discussion. Could this be simplified? I can see two use cases: 1. at the file or directory level, this is unlikely needed: just provide the expression that applies there only e.g. to a doc or source directory in an SPDX doc or a simple expression. 2. for a top level package, would a notion of "licensing scope" be simpler than a full conditional construct? e.g. something like: scope:doc GFDL and MIT scope:tools GPL-2.0+ scope:library LGPL-2.1+ And if no scope is defined it defaults to global and is overridden if a scope is defined? So IMHO this would not be a single expression but an array of expressions. And we might not need a full if then else to express this. -- Cordially Philippe Ombredanne _______________________________________________ Spdx-tech mailing list Spdx-tech@lists.spdx.org https://lists.spdx.org/mailman/listinfo/spdx-tech
