A non-standard "permissive" license

[Lamons, Scott (Open Source Program Office)]

We came across this license in a recent open source review.   Fossology 
mis-identified  this as GPL which is clearly a bug and it's being fixed.   
However, my question is...   would this match any existing SPDX license?

- Copyright (C) 2001 XXX. All rights reserved.
- This software is distributed in the hope that it will be
- useful, but with NO WARRANTY OF ANY KIND.
- No author or distributor accepts responsibility to anyone for the
- consequences of using this software, or for whether it serves any
- particular purpose or works at all, unless he or she says so in
- writing. Everyone is granted permission to copy, modify and
- redistribute this source code, for commercial or non-commercial
- purposes, with the following restrictions: (1) the origin of this
- source code must not be misrepresented; (2) modified versions must
- be plainly marked as such; and (3) this notice may not be removed
- or altered from any source or modified source distribution.


___
Spdx-legal mailing list
Spdx-legal@lists.spdx.org
https://lists.spdx.org/mailman/listinfo/spdx-legal

Re: A non-standard "permissive" license

[Dennis Clark]

This license text appears to be from Leptonica:

https://github.com/rajbot/autocrop/blob/master/leptonica-1.68/leptonica-license.txt

The tortured grammar of this sentence is unique and I don't think it can be
found in any of the SPDX licenses:

"*- No author or distributor accepts responsibility to anyone for the
- consequences of using this software, or for whether it serves any
- particular purpose or works at all, unless he or she says so in
- writing." *

A very rare license indeed!

Hope this was helpful,
Dennis Clark
Software Auditor
www.nexb.com
dmcl...@nexb.com
510-517-9659

On Mon, Mar 4, 2013 at 2:54 PM, Lamons, Scott (Open Source Program Office) <
scott.lam...@hp.com> wrote:

>  We came across this license in a recent open source review.   Fossology
> mis-identified  this as GPL which is clearly a bug and it's being fixed.
> However, my question is...   would this match any existing SPDX license?**
> **
>
> ** **
>
> *- Copyright (C) 2001 XXX. All rights reserved.
> - This software is distributed in the hope that it will be
> - useful, but with NO WARRANTY OF ANY KIND.
> - No author or distributor accepts responsibility to anyone for the
> - consequences of using this software, or for whether it serves any
> - particular purpose or works at all, unless he or she says so in
> - writing. Everyone is granted permission to copy, modify and
> - redistribute this source code, for commercial or non-commercial
> - purposes, with the following restrictions: (1) the origin of this
> - source code must not be misrepresented; (2) modified versions must
> - be plainly marked as such; and (3) this notice may not be removed
> - or altered from any source or modified source distribution.*
>
> ** **
>
> ** **
>
> ___
> Spdx-legal mailing list
> Spdx-legal@lists.spdx.org
> https://lists.spdx.org/mailman/listinfo/spdx-legal
>
>
___
Spdx-legal mailing list
Spdx-legal@lists.spdx.org
https://lists.spdx.org/mailman/listinfo/spdx-legal

Re: A non-standard "permissive" license

[Guillaume Rousseau]

Indeed we have been many time through the issue concerning "rare license".
I understand very well that spdx can not cover/support every licenses. 
But should be able to extend internal license knowledge base guarantying 
there will be no license acronym conflict in the further versions of SPDX.
Could we implement a rule saying that SPDX acronym will never start by 
"M-" which will allow us to implement specific acronym miscellaneous 
licenses not supported by spdx.
Another way to do it could be to allow 2 acronyms in the standard like 
SPDX-GPL-2.0 and GPL-2.0 ?

I prefer the first one.
I don't remember if this point has already been pointed out and 
discussed so I put legal and tech mailing list in cc.

Guillaume



Le 05/03/13 00:34, Dennis Clark a écrit :

This license text appears to be from Leptonica:

https://github.com/rajbot/autocrop/blob/master/leptonica-1.68/leptonica-license.txt

The tortured grammar of this sentence is unique and I don't think it 
can be found in any of the SPDX licenses:


"*- No author or distributor accepts responsibility to anyone for the
- consequences of using this software, or for whether it serves any
- particular purpose or works at all, unless he or she says so in
- writing." *

A very rare license indeed!

Hope this was helpful,
Dennis Clark
Software Auditor
www.nexb.com 
dmcl...@nexb.com 
510-517-9659

On Mon, Mar 4, 2013 at 2:54 PM, Lamons, Scott (Open Source Program 
Office) mailto:scott.lam...@hp.com>> wrote:


We came across this license in a recent open source review.  
Fossology mis-identified this as GPL which is clearly a bug and

it's being fixed.   However, my question is...   would this match
any existing SPDX license?

*- Copyright (C) 2001 XXX. All rights reserved.
- This software is distributed in the hope that it will be
- useful, but with NO WARRANTY OF ANY KIND.
- No author or distributor accepts responsibility to anyone for the
- consequences of using this software, or for whether it serves any
- particular purpose or works at all, unless he or she says so in
- writing. Everyone is granted permission to copy, modify and
- redistribute this source code, for commercial or non-commercial
- purposes, with the following restrictions: (1) the origin of this
- source code must not be misrepresented; (2) modified versions must
- be plainly marked as such; and (3) this notice may not be removed
- or altered from any source or modified source distribution.*


___
Spdx-legal mailing list
Spdx-legal@lists.spdx.org 
https://lists.spdx.org/mailman/listinfo/spdx-legal




___
Spdx-legal mailing list
Spdx-legal@lists.spdx.org
https://lists.spdx.org/mailman/listinfo/spdx-legal



--
Guillaume ROUSSEAU
CEO, Co-Founder, Antelink
Président, Cofondateur, Antelink

18, rue Yves Toudic, 75010, Paris 10ème, France
http://www.antelink.com/
Office : +33 1 42 39 30 78

___
Spdx-legal mailing list
Spdx-legal@lists.spdx.org
https://lists.spdx.org/mailman/listinfo/spdx-legal

RE: A non-standard "permissive" license

[Tom Incorvia]

Hi Guillaume and SPDX Legal,

I believe that we will be best served by having as broad a license list as 
possible, and to have every license on the list be supported.

If the Leptonica license occurs in the wild and has consistent, matchable 
license text, lets vet it an put it into the SPDX list just like any other 
license.

Thanks,

Tom

Tom Incorvia
tom.incor...@microfocus.com<mailto:tom.incor...@microfocus.com>
Direct: (512) 340-1336
Mobile: (408) 499 6850
From: spdx-legal-boun...@lists.spdx.org 
[mailto:spdx-legal-boun...@lists.spdx.org] On Behalf Of Guillaume Rousseau
Sent: Tuesday, March 05, 2013 4:24 AM
To: spdx-legal@lists.spdx.org; spdx-t...@fossbazaar.org
Subject: Re: A non-standard "permissive" license

Indeed we have been many time through the issue concerning "rare license".
I understand very well that spdx can not cover/support every licenses. But 
should be able to extend internal license knowledge base guarantying there will 
be no license acronym conflict in the further versions of SPDX.
Could we implement a rule saying that SPDX acronym will never start by "M-" 
which will allow us to implement specific acronym miscellaneous licenses not 
supported by spdx.
Another way to do it could be to allow 2 acronyms in the standard like 
SPDX-GPL-2.0 and GPL-2.0 ?
I prefer the first one.
I don't remember if this point has already been pointed out and discussed so I 
put legal and tech mailing list in cc.
Guillaume



Le 05/03/13 00:34, Dennis Clark a écrit :
This license text appears to be from Leptonica:

https://github.com/rajbot/autocrop/blob/master/leptonica-1.68/leptonica-license.txt

The tortured grammar of this sentence is unique and I don't think it can be 
found in any of the SPDX licenses:

"- No author or distributor accepts responsibility to anyone for the
- consequences of using this software, or for whether it serves any
- particular purpose or works at all, unless he or she says so in
- writing."

A very rare license indeed!

Hope this was helpful,
Dennis Clark
Software Auditor
www.nexb.com<http://www.nexb.com>
dmcl...@nexb.com<mailto:dmcl...@nexb.com>
510-517-9659

On Mon, Mar 4, 2013 at 2:54 PM, Lamons, Scott (Open Source Program Office) 
mailto:scott.lam...@hp.com>> wrote:
We came across this license in a recent open source review.   Fossology 
mis-identified  this as GPL which is clearly a bug and it's being fixed.   
However, my question is...   would this match any existing SPDX license?

- Copyright (C) 2001 XXX. All rights reserved.
- This software is distributed in the hope that it will be
- useful, but with NO WARRANTY OF ANY KIND.
- No author or distributor accepts responsibility to anyone for the
- consequences of using this software, or for whether it serves any
- particular purpose or works at all, unless he or she says so in
- writing. Everyone is granted permission to copy, modify and
- redistribute this source code, for commercial or non-commercial
- purposes, with the following restrictions: (1) the origin of this
- source code must not be misrepresented; (2) modified versions must
- be plainly marked as such; and (3) this notice may not be removed
- or altered from any source or modified source distribution.



___
Spdx-legal mailing list
Spdx-legal@lists.spdx.org<mailto:Spdx-legal@lists.spdx.org>
https://lists.spdx.org/mailman/listinfo/spdx-legal





___

Spdx-legal mailing list

Spdx-legal@lists.spdx.org<mailto:Spdx-legal@lists.spdx.org>

https://lists.spdx.org/mailman/listinfo/spdx-legal




--

Guillaume ROUSSEAU

CEO, Co-Founder, Antelink

Président, Cofondateur, Antelink



18, rue Yves Toudic, 75010, Paris 10ème, France

http://www.antelink.com/

Office : +33 1 42 39 30 78



__
This email has been scanned by the Symantec Email Security.cloud service.
For more information please visit http://www.symanteccloud.com
__

__
This email has been scanned by the Symantec Email Security.cloud service.
For more information please visit http://www.symanteccloud.com
_
Spdx-legal mailing list
Spdx-legal@lists.spdx.org
https://lists.spdx.org/mailman/listinfo/spdx-legal

Re: A non-standard "permissive" license

[Philippe Ombredanne]

On Tue, Mar 5, 2013 at 3:38 AM, Tom Incorvia
 wrote:
> I believe that we will be best served by having as broad a license list as
> possible, and to have every license on the list be supported.
> If the Leptonica license occurs in the wild and has consistent, matchable
> license text, lets vet it an put it into the SPDX list just like any other
> license.
This is an interesting case. I am not sure that we should support as
broad a list as possible.
The current SPDX spec has support for direct reference (LicenseRef) to
these less common license texts as-is without giving them a name and
needing to include them in the list.

While this is probably not SPDX role to take sides in the license
proliferation debate, all licenses are not equal and may not deserve
the implicit promotion of being included as an SPDX "named" license
list. Giving an SPDX name to a license grants it an implied prominence
and promotion as the SPDX license list is becoming the de-facto
reference for many.  We have certainly a responsibility there: in
promoting a license by including it in the SPDX list it is likely to
become less rare. Beside there is a clear maintenance burden on us to
manage a large unbounded list of SPDX licenses.

With that said, Guillaume point to private naming of licenses is a
valid one. That could be best supported by supporting appropriate
private namespacing (which is something RDF does very well) and could
be something to design for future specs versions

-- 
Philippe Ombredanne

+1 650 799 0949 | pombreda...@nexb.com
DejaCode Enterprise at http://www.dejacode.com
nexB Inc. at http://www.nexb.com
___
Spdx-legal mailing list
Spdx-legal@lists.spdx.org
https://lists.spdx.org/mailman/listinfo/spdx-legal

RE: A non-standard "permissive" license

[Meier, Roger]

I fully agree on this, all licenses should be on the list (including Licenses 
such as Oracle Binary License).
A prefix to identify local/private maintained licenses would be great. ==> use 
one license database

-roger

From: spdx-tech-boun...@lists.spdx.org 
[mailto:spdx-tech-boun...@lists.spdx.org] On Behalf Of Tom Incorvia
Sent: Dienstag, 5. März 2013 12:38
To: guillaume.rouss...@antelink.com; spdx-legal@lists.spdx.org; 
spdx-t...@fossbazaar.org
Subject: RE: A non-standard "permissive" license

Hi Guillaume and SPDX Legal,

I believe that we will be best served by having as broad a license list as 
possible, and to have every license on the list be supported.

If the Leptonica license occurs in the wild and has consistent, matchable 
license text, lets vet it an put it into the SPDX list just like any other 
license.

Thanks,

Tom

Tom Incorvia
tom.incor...@microfocus.com<mailto:tom.incor...@microfocus.com>
Direct: (512) 340-1336
Mobile: (408) 499 6850
From: 
spdx-legal-boun...@lists.spdx.org<mailto:spdx-legal-boun...@lists.spdx.org> 
[mailto:spdx-legal-boun...@lists.spdx.org] On Behalf Of Guillaume Rousseau
Sent: Tuesday, March 05, 2013 4:24 AM
To: spdx-legal@lists.spdx.org<mailto:spdx-legal@lists.spdx.org>; 
spdx-t...@fossbazaar.org<mailto:spdx-t...@fossbazaar.org>
Subject: Re: A non-standard "permissive" license

Indeed we have been many time through the issue concerning "rare license".
I understand very well that spdx can not cover/support every licenses. But 
should be able to extend internal license knowledge base guarantying there will 
be no license acronym conflict in the further versions of SPDX.
Could we implement a rule saying that SPDX acronym will never start by "M-" 
which will allow us to implement specific acronym miscellaneous licenses not 
supported by spdx.
Another way to do it could be to allow 2 acronyms in the standard like 
SPDX-GPL-2.0 and GPL-2.0 ?
I prefer the first one.
I don't remember if this point has already been pointed out and discussed so I 
put legal and tech mailing list in cc.
Guillaume



Le 05/03/13 00:34, Dennis Clark a écrit :
This license text appears to be from Leptonica:

https://github.com/rajbot/autocrop/blob/master/leptonica-1.68/leptonica-license.txt

The tortured grammar of this sentence is unique and I don't think it can be 
found in any of the SPDX licenses:

"- No author or distributor accepts responsibility to anyone for the
- consequences of using this software, or for whether it serves any
- particular purpose or works at all, unless he or she says so in
- writing."

A very rare license indeed!

Hope this was helpful,
Dennis Clark
Software Auditor
www.nexb.com<http://www.nexb.com>
dmcl...@nexb.com<mailto:dmcl...@nexb.com>
510-517-9659

On Mon, Mar 4, 2013 at 2:54 PM, Lamons, Scott (Open Source Program Office) 
mailto:scott.lam...@hp.com>> wrote:
We came across this license in a recent open source review.   Fossology 
mis-identified  this as GPL which is clearly a bug and it's being fixed.   
However, my question is...   would this match any existing SPDX license?

- Copyright (C) 2001 XXX. All rights reserved.
- This software is distributed in the hope that it will be
- useful, but with NO WARRANTY OF ANY KIND.
- No author or distributor accepts responsibility to anyone for the
- consequences of using this software, or for whether it serves any
- particular purpose or works at all, unless he or she says so in
- writing. Everyone is granted permission to copy, modify and
- redistribute this source code, for commercial or non-commercial
- purposes, with the following restrictions: (1) the origin of this
- source code must not be misrepresented; (2) modified versions must
- be plainly marked as such; and (3) this notice may not be removed
- or altered from any source or modified source distribution.



___
Spdx-legal mailing list
Spdx-legal@lists.spdx.org<mailto:Spdx-legal@lists.spdx.org>
https://lists.spdx.org/mailman/listinfo/spdx-legal




___

Spdx-legal mailing list

Spdx-legal@lists.spdx.org<mailto:Spdx-legal@lists.spdx.org>

https://lists.spdx.org/mailman/listinfo/spdx-legal



--

Guillaume ROUSSEAU

CEO, Co-Founder, Antelink

Président, Cofondateur, Antelink



18, rue Yves Toudic, 75010, Paris 10ème, France

http://www.antelink.com/

Office : +33 1 42 39 30 78



__
This email has been scanned by the Symantec Email Security.cloud service.
For more information please visit http://www.symanteccloud.com
__

__
This email has

Re: A non-standard "permissive" license

[Guillaume Rousseau]

It seems this is part of this use case 
http://spdx.org/wiki/license-list-extension

Does [OK] mean it will supported by SPDX 2.0 ?
If yes, I guess that it means that implementation for SPDX 2.0 will fail 
to support collision if it exists (according to the wiki page) and will 
need to update internal list to avoid collision.
Which is fine if we know that we can update internal list once for all, 
without having to deal with further SPDX license list update.

Shall we update this use case or propose a new one for 2.1 use case  ?
Let me know, I can make a first draft of the use case or the scenario.

Guillaume

Le 05/03/13 13:24, Philippe Ombredanne a écrit :

On Tue, Mar 5, 2013 at 3:38 AM, Tom Incorvia
 wrote:

I believe that we will be best served by having as broad a license list as
possible, and to have every license on the list be supported.
If the Leptonica license occurs in the wild and has consistent, matchable
license text, lets vet it an put it into the SPDX list just like any other
license.

This is an interesting case. I am not sure that we should support as
broad a list as possible.
The current SPDX spec has support for direct reference (LicenseRef) to
these less common license texts as-is without giving them a name and
needing to include them in the list.

While this is probably not SPDX role to take sides in the license
proliferation debate, all licenses are not equal and may not deserve
the implicit promotion of being included as an SPDX "named" license
list. Giving an SPDX name to a license grants it an implied prominence
and promotion as the SPDX license list is becoming the de-facto
reference for many.  We have certainly a responsibility there: in
promoting a license by including it in the SPDX list it is likely to
become less rare. Beside there is a clear maintenance burden on us to
manage a large unbounded list of SPDX licenses.

With that said, Guillaume point to private naming of licenses is a
valid one. That could be best supported by supporting appropriate
private namespacing (which is something RDF does very well) and could
be something to design for future specs versions




--
Guillaume ROUSSEAU
CEO, Co-Founder, Antelink
Président, Cofondateur, Antelink

18, rue Yves Toudic, 75010, Paris 10ème, France
http://www.antelink.com/
Office : +33 1 42 39 30 78

___
Spdx-legal mailing list
Spdx-legal@lists.spdx.org
https://lists.spdx.org/mailman/listinfo/spdx-legal

Re: A non-standard "permissive" license

[Philippe Ombredanne]

On Tue, Mar 5, 2013 at 4:16 AM, Meier, Roger  wrote:
> I fully agree on this, all licenses should be on the list (including
> Licenses such as Oracle Binary License).
> A prefix to identify local/private maintained licenses would be great. è use
> one license database
I reckon there is a value in having a comprehensive and universal list
of licenses, but I sincerely doubt this is something that should in
the SPDX list as it is today, for the reasons I mentioned in an
earlier post.

Instead I could imagine something like a second level
non-authoritative community-curated site that inventories any licenses
could work out. And it could be the funnel for the most prominent
licenses to make it to the SPDX list.

I sincerely doubt that SPDX contributors would have the time and the
stamina to take on the job on maintaining a curated list like the
current SPDX list for every license that ever shows up.

-- 
Philippe Ombredanne

+1 650 799 0949 | pombreda...@nexb.com
DejaCode Enterprise at http://www.dejacode.com
nexB Inc. at http://www.nexb.com
___
Spdx-legal mailing list
Spdx-legal@lists.spdx.org
https://lists.spdx.org/mailman/listinfo/spdx-legal

Re: A non-standard "permissive" license

[dmg]

I think that the best way to implement this in the future is to be
able to specify domains in the identifiers. Something like
ninka.bsd3, fossology.afossolyname, spdx.bsd3 and default the
domains to spdx.


--dmg

On Tue, Mar 5, 2013 at 2:24 AM, Guillaume Rousseau
 wrote:
> Indeed we have been many time through the issue concerning "rare license".
> I understand very well that spdx can not cover/support every licenses. But
> should be able to extend internal license knowledge base guarantying there
> will be no license acronym conflict in the further versions of SPDX.
> Could we implement a rule saying that SPDX acronym will never start by "M-"
> which will allow us to implement specific acronym miscellaneous licenses not
> supported by spdx.
> Another way to do it could be to allow 2 acronyms in the standard like
> SPDX-GPL-2.0 and GPL-2.0 ?
> I prefer the first one.
> I don't remember if this point has already been pointed out and discussed so
> I put legal and tech mailing list in cc.
> Guillaume
>
>
>
> Le 05/03/13 00:34, Dennis Clark a écrit :
>
> This license text appears to be from Leptonica:
>
> https://github.com/rajbot/autocrop/blob/master/leptonica-1.68/leptonica-license.txt
>
> The tortured grammar of this sentence is unique and I don't think it can be
> found in any of the SPDX licenses:
>
> "- No author or distributor accepts responsibility to anyone for the
> - consequences of using this software, or for whether it serves any
> - particular purpose or works at all, unless he or she says so in
> - writing."
>
> A very rare license indeed!
>
> Hope this was helpful,
> Dennis Clark
> Software Auditor
> www.nexb.com
> dmcl...@nexb.com
> 510-517-9659
>
> On Mon, Mar 4, 2013 at 2:54 PM, Lamons, Scott (Open Source Program Office)
>  wrote:
>>
>> We came across this license in a recent open source review.   Fossology
>> mis-identified  this as GPL which is clearly a bug and it's being fixed.
>> However, my question is...   would this match any existing SPDX license?
>>
>>
>>
>> - Copyright (C) 2001 XXX. All rights reserved.
>> - This software is distributed in the hope that it will be
>> - useful, but with NO WARRANTY OF ANY KIND.
>> - No author or distributor accepts responsibility to anyone for the
>> - consequences of using this software, or for whether it serves any
>> - particular purpose or works at all, unless he or she says so in
>> - writing. Everyone is granted permission to copy, modify and
>> - redistribute this source code, for commercial or non-commercial
>> - purposes, with the following restrictions: (1) the origin of this
>> - source code must not be misrepresented; (2) modified versions must
>> - be plainly marked as such; and (3) this notice may not be removed
>> - or altered from any source or modified source distribution.
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> ___
>> Spdx-legal mailing list
>> Spdx-legal@lists.spdx.org
>> https://lists.spdx.org/mailman/listinfo/spdx-legal
>>
>
>
>
> ___
> Spdx-legal mailing list
> Spdx-legal@lists.spdx.org
> https://lists.spdx.org/mailman/listinfo/spdx-legal
>
>
>
> --
> Guillaume ROUSSEAU
> CEO, Co-Founder, Antelink
> Président, Cofondateur, Antelink
>
> 18, rue Yves Toudic, 75010, Paris 10ème, France
> http://www.antelink.com/
> Office : +33 1 42 39 30 78
>
>
> ___
> Spdx-tech mailing list
> spdx-t...@lists.spdx.org
> https://lists.spdx.org/mailman/listinfo/spdx-tech
>



-- 
--dmg

---
Daniel M. German
http://turingmachine.org
___
Spdx-legal mailing list
Spdx-legal@lists.spdx.org
https://lists.spdx.org/mailman/listinfo/spdx-legal

Re: A non-standard "permissive" license

[Philip Odence]

Back to a point that Phlippe made earlier, while we are not really taking
sides, I certainly do not think SPDX should be party to encouraging
license proliferation. It would probably make sense for us to take a
position (or a non-position) explicitly at the top of the license list to
the effect that the list is not meant to be an endorsement of these
licenses in any way. Further, I think we could say that the SPDX group
supports in concept license standardization or does not encourage, but
that the license list, itself, is not meant to support this position. It
is meant only to standardize references to the most commonly used
licenses, not to promote or discourage the use of any license.



On 3/5/13 10:42 AM, "Philippe Ombredanne"  wrote:

>On Tue, Mar 5, 2013 at 4:16 AM, Meier, Roger  wrote:
>> I fully agree on this, all licenses should be on the list (including
>> Licenses such as Oracle Binary License).
>> A prefix to identify local/private maintained licenses would be great.
>>è use
>> one license database
>I reckon there is a value in having a comprehensive and universal list
>of licenses, but I sincerely doubt this is something that should in
>the SPDX list as it is today, for the reasons I mentioned in an
>earlier post.
>
>Instead I could imagine something like a second level
>non-authoritative community-curated site that inventories any licenses
>could work out. And it could be the funnel for the most prominent
>licenses to make it to the SPDX list.
>
>I sincerely doubt that SPDX contributors would have the time and the
>stamina to take on the job on maintaining a curated list like the
>current SPDX list for every license that ever shows up.
>
>-- 
>Philippe Ombredanne
>
>+1 650 799 0949 | pombreda...@nexb.com
>DejaCode Enterprise at http://www.dejacode.com
>nexB Inc. at http://www.nexb.com
>___
>Spdx-legal mailing list
>Spdx-legal@lists.spdx.org
>https://lists.spdx.org/mailman/listinfo/spdx-legal

___
Spdx-legal mailing list
Spdx-legal@lists.spdx.org
https://lists.spdx.org/mailman/listinfo/spdx-legal

Re: A non-standard "permissive" license

[Jilayne Lovejoy]

Ok, so let me see if I can sum up the issues that have been brought up on this 
thread…

1) Scott asks if anyone has seen this license

2) should we add it to list?

3) possible need for allowing other list maintainers to use a short identifier 
that "works" with SPDX and SPDX LIcense List

4) statement on license proliferation needed?

5) freeware licenses suggested added to SPDX License List

Um, where do I begin?

As for the original question – no, Scott, I haven't seen this one, as far as I 
can remember; but I have seen many licenses like this;  what I mean by that is 
a short, very permissive license text that does not match to any specific 
license (such as MIT or BSD).  In terms of whether this one (or this type in 
general) should be added to the list, I would defer to the same process and 
criteria as any license to be added.

I agree with Tom AND Philippe in regards to how broad the SPDX License LIst 
should be.  That is, it should be broad, but with limitation.  The goal is 
clearly stated (see first paragraph at top of this page: 
http://spdx.org/content/license-list) and the intention is not to endorse any 
particular license, but rather the license list should serve a very practical 
purpose.  That being said and given the vast number of licenses like this 
(short, varied, permissive), a balance must be struck to not bloat the list to 
the point of being difficult to use.  One very practical matter with these 
kinds of license is how to name them, as they often have no name, thus forcing 
us to make one up… problems here, as you can imagine…  considering we are 
currently discussing the license list guidelines (for how to decide what to 
include or not include), I would recommend all on this thread to check out the 
last couple meeting minutes on the topic and weigh in there.

As for Guillaume's idea of having a letter reserved for short identifiers for 
other license lists to use (M would not work – MPL!!  We might have to use a 
symbol or X? Would have to check current short identifiers for a letter not 
being used… :) - this is an interesting idea that seems rather easy to 
implement, but could also cause other problems.  I was not aware of the use 
case cited and we'll have to check with the tech team on that. ??

As for a statement regarding license proliferation – this might be a good 
clarification in our literature, not sure if necessary, but certainly would not 
hurt.  If someone wants to take a first stab at drafting a short (no more than 
a few sentences) explanation, the legal team can then review.

Finally, in regards to freeware licenses (e.g. Oracle Binary Code License) - we 
have discussed this several times and has been part of on-going discussion on 
license list guidelines (see comment above), so I'm not going to repeat it 
here, but again, please review those notes and join that discussion on the 
calls.

So, in sum – we have a bunch of different threads that came out of one curious 
license!!  Perhaps we can separate these into a few sub-threads for ease of 
following?  We have set out various projects for the legal team to work on 
(with project owners) this year, so if there is a new project that we should 
try to add, then let's look into doing that so it gets proper attention going 
forward.

Thanks for all the interest!!!

- Jilayne

From: , Roger mailto:r.me...@siemens.com>>
Date: Tuesday, March 5, 2013 5:16 AM
To: Tom Incorvia 
mailto:tom.incor...@microfocus.com>>, 
"guillaume.rouss...@antelink.com<mailto:guillaume.rouss...@antelink.com>" 
mailto:guillaume.rouss...@antelink.com>>, 
SPDX-legal mailto:spdx-legal@lists.spdx.org>>, 
"spdx-t...@fossbazaar.org<mailto:spdx-t...@fossbazaar.org>" 
mailto:spdx-t...@fossbazaar.org>>
Subject: RE: A non-standard "permissive" license

I fully agree on this, all licenses should be on the list (including Licenses 
such as Oracle Binary License).
A prefix to identify local/private maintained licenses would be great. ==> use 
one license database

-roger

From: spdx-tech-boun...@lists.spdx.org<mailto:spdx-tech-boun...@lists.spdx.org> 
[mailto:spdx-tech-boun...@lists.spdx.org] On Behalf Of Tom Incorvia
Sent: Dienstag, 5. März 2013 12:38
To: guillaume.rouss...@antelink.com<mailto:guillaume.rouss...@antelink.com>; 
spdx-legal@lists.spdx.org<mailto:spdx-legal@lists.spdx.org>; 
spdx-t...@fossbazaar.org<mailto:spdx-t...@fossbazaar.org>
Subject: RE: A non-standard "permissive" license

Hi Guillaume and SPDX Legal,

I believe that we will be best served by having as broad a license list as 
possible, and to have every license on the list be supported.

If the Leptonica license occurs in the wild and has consistent, matchable 
license text, lets vet it an put it into the SPDX list just like any other 
license.

Thanks,

Tom

Tom Incorvia
tom.incor...@microfocus.com<mailto:tom.incor...@microfocu