Gisi, Mark: > The absence of Public Domain from the license list was not an oversight. A > fair amount of discussion took place to decide how to handle a public domain > designation. The current practice is to create a LicenseRef (a user defined > license reference that is local to an SPDX file).
I think that public domain designations should be handled *exactly* the same way by SPDX as all other common licenses - just create SPDX license identifiers for common ones. Indeed, SPDX already *has* license identifiers for the public domain, through the license identifiers CC0-1.0, PDDL-1.0, and SAX-PD. If a license statement is common, it should be in the License List. A "license" is just "permission to do something". Statements from the US government declaring that software is in public domain are simply license statements, and should be treated identically as any other license. > [I suggest] that the government, like the SQLite project, consider > including a standard government public domain notice in the header of every > source file. This would make it easy for one to understand the intent and to > create License references. You mean the US government should get its act together and act as a single organization? That sounds reasonable enough, but you will be disappointed :-). Some government organizations use CC0 (already on the list), but many projects do not. CENDI is usually the US government group that would recommend text like this, but I didn't see a particular suggestion here: http://www.cendi.gov/publications/ Besides, that same "should" applies to industry, as well as government, and industry doesn't meet that standard either. Simple example: At a practical level the MIT license and BSD-2-Clause licenses are legally similar, but they have different legal texts, so they get different SPDX license ids. If a license text is in use by a number of projects, it should get a license id. I think software from the government should NOT be excluded. Yes, its legal texts are different, and they often grant all rights (at least within the country). So what? That's exactly what SPDX is good for - capturing common legal text statements. --- David A. Wheeler _______________________________________________ Spdx-legal mailing list Spdx-legal@lists.spdx.org https://lists.spdx.org/mailman/listinfo/spdx-legal
