J Lovejoy: > Do NOT add a identifier or operator, etc. for the found-license-text-only > scenario where you don’t know if the intent of the copyright holder was “only > or “or later” and are thus left to interpret clause
I disagree, sorry. > - we don’t need to solve this right now and we can always add this option > later > - without adding a third option, we are in the same position we have been in > since the birth of the SPDX License List. incremental changes have always > been our go-to strategy; let’s take a first step to clarify the current > identifiers in a way that the FSF can get behind. If, for a later release, we > think we need this third option, then we can discuss that further once we > have some time under our belts with this change. No, this is the *reason* that there's a problem. The *reason* that "GPL-2.0" isn't working is, in part, because it overloads two notions. "GPL-2.0" is supposed to mean "Only 2.0" (per the spec) . But tools only know "I saw a GPL-2.0 license", so how can they represent that information? The obvious way is "GPL-2.0", so that same identifier can mean "2.0 at least, and I don't know if there are other versions allowed". That's not good. If we wait to "add this option later", "GPL-2.0-only" will probably have morphed in *practice* into "GPL-2.0 at least, and I don't know if it's the only version". So while everyone can congratulate themselves about the clarity of the spec, very soon it will predictably be *unclear* in practice. If we want to be able to express "exactly this version", we also need to be able to represent "at least this version". --- David A. Wheeler _______________________________________________ Spdx-legal mailing list Spdx-legal@lists.spdx.org https://lists.spdx.org/mailman/listinfo/spdx-legal
