On Wed, Oct 11, 2017 at 11:13:56PM -0600, J Lovejoy wrote: > But this missed a key part of the core goals of SPDX: Implicit in > those above goals is that the SPDX License List (including the > license short identifiers and the license expression language) aim > to provide a “language” to identify what we know, what we find - not > what we don’t know or find. Having some kind of “ambiguous” operator > (however we might decide to express that) is incongruent with this > and the goals of SPDX. The original proposal as we came up with > allows for an accurate description of what is found, including in > the case of finding only the text of a license.
This may be cutting it to cleanly. For full SPDX documents, there are comment fields (e.g. PackageLicenseComments [1]) for motivating your concluded license. I think that motivation is especially important when you're stretching a bit to bridge a gap between a declared license (or lack thereof) and your conclusion. That all works fine in SPDX documents, and I think we want to keep allowing SPDX authors to explicitly say “this situation was confusing, but I've eventually decided that the license is … based on …”. And for the really hairy situations, you can always bail to NOASSERTION [2], folks can still read about your partial conclusion in the comments. The ambiguous operator (first floated as “unclear version” in [3]) and my OR-MAYBE proposal [4] are both attempts to allow an SPDX License Expression authors to handle those situations they consider too ambiguous for a complete conclusion, but where they can provide more structure than NOASSERTION. The ambiguous and OR-MAYBE operators are both providing a way to express partial conclusions *without* recourse to a full SPDX document and its unstructured comment fields. This may be useful in general, and David has said he would be satisfied with: GPL-2.0 OR-MAYBE GPL-2.0+ most of the time [5]. I still don't have anyone stepping up to say they'll produce such expressions though [6], and I doubt its worth writing up a spec for it without someone saying “I (or my tool) wants to write partially-concluded license expressions but there's no syntax for it”. But “nobody has told us they'd write this yet” is a much narrower rejection than “the proposals are incongruent with the goals of SPDX”. > So, I’d like to bring everyone attention back to the original > proposal (see link above) and if there are any further concerns > about it, now is the time to raise them. Meanwhile, Kate and I will > follow-up with John and Richard at the FSF to better understand > their concerns as well. I'm on board with that proposal (especially if it includes the compatibility metadata mentioned on the wiki page and earlier on this list in [7]). And I think it can move ahead independently of any ambiguous, OR-MAYBE, or PROXY [8] operators. Cheers, Trevor [1]: https://spdx.org/spdx-specification-21-web-version#h.41mghml [2]: https://spdx.org/spdx-specification-21-web-version#h.ihv636 [3]: https://lists.spdx.org/pipermail/spdx-legal/2017-September/002230.html Subject: reminder: call Thursday Date: Wed, 27 Sep 2017 16:49:46 -0600 Message-Id: <9216ca28-7f42-452a-913f-8bcc0cfe1...@jilayne.com> [4]: https://lists.spdx.org/pipermail/spdx-legal/2017-September/002233.html Subject: "unclear version" and OR-MAYBE operators (was: reminder: call Thursday) Date: Wed, 27 Sep 2017 22:15:23 -0700 Message-ID: <20170928051523.gn20...@valgrind.tremily.us> [5]: https://lists.spdx.org/pipermail/spdx-legal/2017-September/002235.html Subject: RE: "unclear version" and OR-MAYBE operators (was: reminder: call Thursday) Date: Thu, 28 Sep 2017 16:43:46 +0000 Message-ID: <33f120c1096a4cada022389754cd4...@exch13-m1.ida.org> [6]: https://lists.spdx.org/pipermail/spdx-legal/2017-September/002238.html Subject: Re: "unclear version" and OR-MAYBE operators Date: Thu, 28 Sep 2017 11:22:27 -0700 Message-ID: <20170928182227.gp20...@valgrind.tremily.us> [7]: https://lists.spdx.org/pipermail/spdx-legal/2017-August/002126.html Subject: Re: minutes, summary, next steps Date: Thu, 17 Aug 2017 14:37:22 -0700 Message-ID: <20170817213722.gk23...@valgrind.tremily.us> [8]: https://lists.spdx.org/pipermail/spdx-legal/2017-August/002110.html Subject: Re: joint call legal/tech team - Tuesday, Aug 8 Date: Fri, 04 Aug 2017 17:03:26 -0700 Message-ID: <20170805000326.gw23...@valgrind.tremily.us> -- 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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