On Fri, Oct 13, 2017 at 10:20:33AM -0700, Gary O'Neall wrote:
> There is a request by the FSF and approved by the legal team to add
> a property to the listed licenses isFsfFree to indicate if a license
> is identified by the Free Software Foundation as a Free / Libre
> license.  This would be a simple Boolean type.

I am against this in license-list-XML, for the same reasons I am
against our current osi-approved type: SPDX should not be a canonical
source of whether *someone else* has approved a license or not.  I'd
much rather provide tools for Alice to start with an SDPX ID and
lookup Bob's notes for a given license.  More on this in [1].

And the OSI API [2] *already* supports lookups by SPDX ID [3]:

  $ curl -s https://api.opensource.org/license/SPDX/BSD-3-Clause | jq .keywords
  [
    "osi-approved",
    "popular",
    "permissive"
  ]

I think the FSF should provide a similar API to expose its
license-categorization information in a structured way.  Then we can
include FSF IDs in our license metadata (ideally generated through
automated matching [4]) and/or they can provide SPDX IDs in their
license metadata.  User agents could ask the FSF if they consider a
license GPL-compatible, GPL-incompatible, free, non-free,
for-a-viewpoint, etc., etc. [5] in a machine-readable way.

> The field will be accessible in the JSON, RDFa, RDF/Turtle, RDF/XML,
> and RDFa formats of the license in addition to being exposed through
> the SPDX Tool Java libraries.

I'm fine with exposing whatever you want downstream for convenience,
but I think the only thing that should go in license-list-XML and
spdx-spec is the FSF license ID.

Cheers,
Trevor

[1]: https://github.com/spdx/license-list-XML/issues/417
[2]: https://opensource.org/node/822
[3]: 
https://github.com/OpenSourceOrg/api/blob/master/doc/endpoints.md#licenseschemeidentifier
[4]: https://github.com/spdx/license-list-XML/issues/418
[5]: https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html

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