I think there's something a little odd about the EPL 2.0 opt-in GPL compatibility feature I hadn't paid attention to before (despite having reviewed the license closely during its drafting and the OSI approval process).
The way the opt-in GPL compatibility works, the initial licensor of 'the Program' has to include a notice which seems to say, in effect, that the code from that initial licensor is disjunctively dual-licensed under EPL and some particular allowed GPL-family license. Subsequent licensors downstream are inheriting a feature that is not really obvious from the text of the required notice from the initial licensor, which I read as allowing pure-EPL-2.0 code to be distributed under the GPL-family license instead. So, for example, in a scenario where the initial licensor wanted to allow compatibility with GPLv2 + Classpath Exception, the correct SPDX description of the Program would seem to be, potentially: (EPL-2.0 OR (GPL-2.0 WITH Classpath-exception-2.0)) AND (EPL-2.0 WITH whatever-SPDX-were-to-call-the-Built-in-EPL-2.0-GPL-copyleft-escape-hatch) This is odd because it seems to imply that the EPL 2.0 compatibility provision is unnecessary. The initial licensor is dual licensing the initial EPL code anyway, so it would always have been possible for subsequent contributions to the Program to be combinable with other GPLv2 + Classpath Exception code. The only difference seems to be that the subsequent EPL 2.0 licensors can present their code as "pure EPL 2.0" code and still benefit from the compatibility feature - i.e. they can avoid having to worry about being careful not to be seen as removing the upstream dual license feature. Maybe I'm not reading it correctly or need a second cup of coffee but I'm not really seeing how the above SPDX expression would be different from (EPL-2.0 OR (GPL-2.0 WITH Classpath-exception-2.0)) though. Richard ----- Original Message ----- From: "David A Wheeler" <dwhee...@ida.org> To: "Kate Stewart" <kstew...@linuxfoundation.org>, "Gàry O'Neall" <g...@sourceauditor.com> Cc: "SPDX-legal" <spdx-legal@lists.spdx.org> Sent: Tuesday, August 22, 2017 1:02:51 PM Subject: RE: New License/Exception Request: EPL-2.0 Kate Stewart: Possibly you're using WITH (which is restricted to only refer to exceptions when you mean to use AND?? Does the following look like what you're trying to represent? EPL-2.0 EPL-2.0 AND GPL-2.0 EPL-2.0 AND (GPL-2.0 with Classpath-exception-2.0) Those are *syntactically* fine SPDX license expressions, of course. However - do they really *mean* "EPL-2.0 AND GPL-2.0"?!? That would mean that recipients would have to comply with *both* licenses. Perhaps they meant "EPL-2.0 OR GPL-2.0". That way, recipients could choose which one could be used. --- David A. Wheeler _______________________________________________ Spdx-legal mailing list Spdx-legal@lists.spdx.org https://lists.spdx.org/mailman/listinfo/spdx-legal
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