I didn't see this particular topic addressed in the specification (although
I'm happy to be correcedt if I missed it), so I thought I'd post and see
whether there is a solution that's commonly used, or if there's room for a
new identifier.

 

Virtually all so-called "permissive" licenses permit the recipient of code
to license out under different terms, as long as all the requirements of the
in-bound license are met. In almost all of these permissive licenses those
requirement boil down to:

1.      Preserve all existing IP notices (or in some cases, just copyright
notices)
2.      Provide a copy of the license (or something to that effect:
retaining "this permission notice" (ICU/Unicode/MIT)  or "this list of
conditions" (BSD) or providing "a copy of this License" (Apache 2.0))

 

The rules around element 1 and SPDX are well-described.

With regard to element 2, a fully-compliant but informative notice when
there is a change from the in-bound to the out-bound license would look
something like this (with the square bracketed part being an example of a
way to say this):

 

SPDX-License-Identifier: MIT

[This file/package/project contains code originally licensed under:]

SPDX-License-Identifier: BSD-2-Clause

 

The point being to express that the outbound license is MIT, but in order to
fully comply with the requirements of BSD-2-Clause, one must retain " this
list of conditions and the following disclaimer" which including a copy of
BSD-2-Clause accomplishes. Without the square bracketed statement above, it
seems confusing as to what the license is (or whether, for example, the code
is dual-licensed MIT AND BSD-2-Clause.


One way to do this I suppose is to use the LicenseComment: field to include
this information, but it seems to me that this is enough of a common
situation that there ought to be something more specific to address this
situation.

 

Thoughts? Am I missing something?



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