Re-reading the SPDX matching guidelines, one sentence I had been completely overlooking seems to address some of the concerns I've had about BSD-3-Clause-variant licenses: "T he text indicated as such can be replaced with similar values (e.g., a different name or generic term; different date) and still be considered a positive match." However I find this sentence difficult to interpret -- do "similar" and "different" refer to the parameterized things in the SPDX version, or do they instead go to internal consistency within a real-world instance of a license type? -- and I might not be reading it correctly.
In light of that sentence, the way I am assuming it should be read, the colored items in, for example, https://spdx.org/licenses/BSD-3-Clause.html are not supposed to be understood to be strict internally-consistent placeholders - for example, the fact that " THE COPYRIGHT HOLDERS AND CONTRIBUTORS" is used in the first sentence in the disclaimer does not mean that " THE COPYRIGHT HOLDER OR CONTRIBUTORS " is supposed to correspond to the first sentence such that an instantiation of "COPYRIGHT HOLDER" in the first sentence must match an instantiation of "COPYRIGHT HOLDER" in the second sentence (as an aside, I assume the inconsistency in pluralization of COPYRIGHT HOLDER is the result of copying of the OSI version of the 3-clause BSD license, which probably will get fixed on the OSI website). In the case of the GHC license, we have a very small discrepancy relative to the SPDX version: " THE UNIVERSITY COURT OF THE UNIVERSITY OF GLASGOW AND THE CONTRIBUTORS" in the first sentence of the disclaimer and " THE UNIVERSITY COURT OF THE UNIVERSITY OF GLASGOW OR THE CONTRIBUTORS" in the second sentence. I can read the sentence I quoted above from the matching guidelines to indicate that "THE CONTRIBUTORS" matches article-less "CONTRIBUTORS", but if that's a correct reading I think it should be stated more clearly. ----- Original Message ----- From: "W. Trevor King" <wk...@tremily.us> To: "David A Wheeler" <dwhee...@ida.org> Cc: "Richard Fontana" <rfont...@redhat.com>, "J Lovejoy" <opensou...@jilayne.com>, "SPDX-legal" <spdx-legal@lists.spdx.org>, "David Parrish" <daveparr...@tutanota.com> Sent: Tuesday, June 13, 2017 3:13:40 PM Subject: Re: New License Request: The Glasgow Haskell Compiler License On Tue, Jun 13, 2017 at 02:59:30PM -0400, Wheeler, David A wrote: Richard Fontana: > The way I read the matching guidelines this license does not > actually match to BSD-3-Clause, even though it obviously should. > I think the problem is that I am reading the matching guidelines > more literally than they may be intended to be read, but given > that this is supposed to be a formal specification I think the > matching guidelines ought to be made more precise. For example, if > the word "the" is optional in certain contexts for purposes of > matching, that ought to be accounted for in the formulation of the > matching guidelines. I think those are bugs in the matching guidelines, not a failure to match ☺. If there are bugs, I think they should be fixed! Are you suggesting a blanket: All articles (“a”, “an”, “the”, …) are optional for matching purposes. in [1]? Or are you suggesting BSD-3-Clause be updated to use: 3. Neither <<var;name=organizationArticleClause3;original=the ;match=.+>>name of Cheers, Trevor [1]: https://spdx.org/spdx-license-list/matching-guidelines -- This email may be signed or encrypted with GnuPG (http://www.gnupg.org). For more information, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pretty_Good_Privacy
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