Sebastien, LEGALLY-EQUIVALENT-TO bothers me since "the producer of the SPDX document containing such a Relationship has made the claim that they believe the two to be legally equivalent" - if I understand that these tags are being assigned by the vendor, do I trust their legal determination?
MATCHES_LICENSE also bothers me because it feels so binary. But I may be nitpicking there. I would be more inclined to SIMILAR_LICENSE. Best regards, Ria Farrell Schalnat Open Source Program Manager Hewlett Packard Enterprise [email protected] -----Original Message----- From: [email protected] <[email protected]> On Behalf Of Sebastian Crane Sent: Friday, June 3, 2022 2:22 PM To: SPDX Legal Mailing List <[email protected]>; SPDX Technical Mailing List <[email protected]> Subject: A suggestion to use Relationships for the licence variants use-case Dear all, On our joint SPDX Legal/Tech meeting today, one of the use-cases that was discussed was No.6: "issue of capturing variants of licenses which match the same listed license per the matching guidelines" It was one of the use-cases for which solving with licence namespaces was least well received (by the informal poll we did). I would like to suggest an alternative solution: to add a couple of new SPDX Relationship types, which could be much more palatable than the much more wider-scope change of licence namespaces. As I understood it, the original suggestion was for the facility to 'group' licence texts together within a licence namespace if they all match each other (as per our matching guidelines), but are textually or visually different in non-substantive ways. My suggestion is to add two new Relationship types: - MATCHES_LICENSE: Relationship: LicenseRef-Weirdly-Formatted-BSD MATCHES_LICENSE BSD-2-Clause ...meaning a claim that LicenseRef-Weirdly-Formatted-BSD is identical to BSD-2-Clause as per the matching guidelines, yet one made in a way that allows the exact text found (complete with weird formatting) to be defined in the SPDX document under LicenseRef-Weirdly-Formatted-BSD. - LEGALLY_EQUIVALENT_TO Relationship: LicenseRef-MIT-With-Spelling-Mistake LEGALLY_EQUIVALENT_TO MIT ...meaning that, although LicenseRef-MIT-With-Spelling-Mistake is a different licence (as per the matching guidelines) to MIT, the producer of the SPDX document containing such a Relationship has made the claim that they believe the two to be legally equivalent. It could be said that the MATCHES_LICENSE Relationship type need not exist, since anyone could simply run a licence matching tool over the text themselves. However, the ability to limit the computational time spent matching to only licences that have been claimed to match could still be helpful; being able to make an explicit claim of a match seems like a benefit too. In general, it isn't good to add Relationships types if they aren't needed, but the fact that people want to communicate this suggests a strong reason to add (and thus standardise) the type. I think it's definitely within scope for SPDX. I'd love to hear any questions/feedback about this suggestion, and especially to hear whether it would indeed enable some use cases of the meeting's attendees! Best wishes, Sebastian -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Links: You receive all messages sent to this group. View/Reply Online (#4577): https://lists.spdx.org/g/Spdx-tech/message/4577 Mute This Topic: https://lists.spdx.org/mt/91530334/21656 Group Owner: [email protected] Unsubscribe: https://lists.spdx.org/g/Spdx-tech/unsub [[email protected]] -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
