Wheeler, David A twisted the bytes to say:
David> From a programmer's perspective I think the "cryptic" approach is FAR David> superior. There are lots of tools that can quickly examine files and David> return text with the pattern "SPDX-License-Identifier: ", and other David> tools that can trivially process the stuff after it. The above David> alternative is more work to process, and humans don't like unnecessary David> work :-). David> If you want more boilerplate with the goal of enforceability, you David> might try a format that's trivial to process, e.g.: David> SPDX-License-Notice: This file is licensed under the following license(s): David> SPDX-License-Identifier: MIT David> SPDX-License-More-Information: http://wiki.spdx.org/ I like this idea. My point is not about being cryptic or not, but being able to convey what the intention is to people who don't know anything about SPDX. There needs to be a way that if somebody opens the file, they know that that SPDX-License-Identifier means, and that it is an intention to license the file under that license. Now regarding the immutability of the SPDX license list, one way to deal with it is to version the list, but then the version of the list would have to be included in the file that is referring to the license. --dmg -- Daniel M. German "A coin symbolizes our free will" El ZahÃr, Jorge Luis Borges http://turingmachine.org/ http://silvernegative.com/ dmg (at) uvic (dot) ca replace (at) with @ and (dot) with . _______________________________________________ Spdx-tech mailing list Spdx-tech@lists.spdx.org https://lists.spdx.org/mailman/listinfo/spdx-tech