Hi Jilayne, Thanks for writing this up.
A key part is missing in the description of the original FSF proposal here though -- which is deprecating the existing GPL-2.0 and similar "plain" identifiers for GNU licenses so that the identifiers used always indicate whether the version is "only" or "any later". As I understand it, people had concerns with deprecating the plain identifiers because of situations where they (for example) find a copy of GPLv2, but no clear statement about whether the program is actually licensed under its terms. To address this, we suggested still deprecating the plain identifier but adding an ambiguous/unclear identifier that still indicates a copy of the GPL was found but does not mislead observers into thinking that there are sufficiently clear licensing statements along with it. I understand SPDX doesn't want to make legal judgments. Which is why it should indicate when there is uncertainty. Situations like "found a copy of the license but not clear licensing statement" should be flagged as things to be fixed, if SPDX wants to achieve its goal of successfully communicating reliable license information. Sure, determining when there is uncertainty could be described as a legal judgment. So is acting as though there is certainty. Some level of that is both unavoidable and necessary. We haven't changed our mind about what we do and don't support here; and I think we'd be open to other ways to indicate ambiguity/uncertainty, including possibly using NOASSERTION. Can we get a list of all of the options on the table for dealing with the case of "found a copy of the GPLv2, but no licensing statement anywhere"? -john -- John Sullivan | Executive Director, Free Software Foundation GPG Key: A462 6CBA FF37 6039 D2D7 5544 97BA 9CE7 61A0 963B https://status.fsf.org/johns | https://fsf.org/blogs/RSS Do you use free software? Donate to join the FSF and support freedom at <https://my.fsf.org/join>. _______________________________________________ Spdx-legal mailing list Spdx-legal@lists.spdx.org https://lists.spdx.org/mailman/listinfo/spdx-legal
