No, that’s not really my issue. I believe the logical operators and the ability 
to designate file-level licenses in SPDX handle your situation.

I’m talking about using SPDX to provide a copy of the terms of a license which 
don’t apply, but which nevertheless must be provided per the license itself. As 
is required in BSD/MIT/Apache (as well as copyleft licenses, but that’s really 
not applicable to my circumstances since copyleft requires the license terms be 
provided, *and* be applied)

 

From: s...@lists.spdx.org <s...@lists.spdx.org> On Behalf Of Shawn Clark
Sent: Tuesday, July 5, 2022 10:48 AM
To: s...@lists.spdx.org
Cc: SPDX-legal <spdx-legal@lists.spdx.org>
Subject: Re: [spdx] Specific SPDX identifier question I didn't see addressed in 
the specification

 

I have spent a lot of time contemplating the question, but want to confirm I'm 
thinking about the same thing:

 

Are you talking about the nature of open source requiring (such as in a 
requirements.txt) other open source code/components that ultimately mean the 
terms of several licenses would apply to the top level software package (such 
as the total python package)? And how to include those identifiers in spdx, 
either as a requirement of the open source license, or as a pass-through of a 
license (such as lgpl/gpl)?

 

I have thoughts on the topic but wanted to confirm before I ramble on about it 
😁 I may be off the rails here.

 

Cheers!

-Shawn Clark

Michigan Attorney, P79081

 

 

 

 

On Fri, Jul 1, 2022, 4:17 PM McCoy Smith <mc...@lexpan.law 
<mailto:mc...@lexpan.law> > wrote:

Well the example is the reverse: inbound BSD-2-Clause, outbound MIT.

I’m more thinking license identifiers that go with the code (since I think for 
most folks that’s where they do license attribution/license copy requirements). 

But obviously the issue/problem is more generic given that some permissive 
licenses allow the notice to be in either (or in some cases require in both) 
the source or documentation.

 

From: s...@lists.spdx.org <mailto:s...@lists.spdx.org>  <s...@lists.spdx.org 
<mailto:s...@lists.spdx.org> > On Behalf Of J Lovejoy
Sent: Friday, July 1, 2022 1:11 PM
To: SPDX-legal <spdx-legal@lists.spdx.org <mailto:spdx-legal@lists.spdx.org> >
Subject: Re: [spdx] Specific SPDX identifier question I didn't see addressed in 
the specification

 

Hi McCoy!

 

I’m moving the SPDX-general list to BCC and replying to SPDX-legal as that is 
the right place for this discussion.

 

Where is this question coming up in terms of context? That is, are you thinking 
in the context of an SPDX document and capturing  the licensing info for a file 
that is under MIT originally but then redistributed under BSD-2-Clause? Or are 
you thinking in the context of using an SPDX license identifiers in the source 
files?

 

Thanks,

Jilayne

 

On Jul 1, 2022, at 12:01 PM, McCoy Smith <mc...@lexpan.law 
<mailto:mc...@lexpan.law> > wrote:

 

I didn’t see this particular topic addressed in the specification (although I’m 
happy to be correcedt if I missed it), so I thought I’d post and see whether 
there is a solution that’s commonly used, or if there’s room for a new 
identifier.

 

Virtually all so-called “permissive” licenses permit the recipient of code to 
license out under different terms, as long as all the requirements of the 
in-bound license are met. In almost all of these permissive licenses those 
requirement boil down to:

1.      Preserve all existing IP notices (or in some cases, just copyright 
notices)
2.      Provide a copy of the license (or something to that effect: retaining 
“this permission notice” (ICU/Unicode/MIT)  or “this list of conditions” (BSD) 
or providing “a copy of this License” (Apache 2.0))

 

The rules around element 1 and SPDX are well-described.

With regard to element 2, a fully-compliant but informative notice when there 
is a change from the in-bound to the out-bound license would look something 
like this (with the square bracketed part being an example of a way to say 
this):

 

SPDX-License-Identifier: MIT

[This file/package/project contains code originally licensed under:]

SPDX-License-Identifier: BSD-2-Clause

 

The point being to express that the outbound license is MIT, but in order to 
fully comply with the requirements of BSD-2-Clause, one must retain “ this list 
of conditions and the following disclaimer” which including a copy of 
BSD-2-Clause accomplishes. Without the square bracketed statement above, it 
seems confusing as to what the license is (or whether, for example, the code is 
dual-licensed MIT AND BSD-2-Clause.


One way to do this I suppose is to use the LicenseComment: field to include 
this information, but it seems to me that this is enough of a common situation 
that there ought to be something more specific to address this situation.

 

Thoughts? Am I missing something?

 





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