Re: [directory-discuss] Linking licenses to SPDX

[W. Trevor King]

On Wed, Oct 25, 2017 at 11:24:18AM -0200, Adonay Felipe Nogueira wrote:
> One thing that I noticed 6 months ago when I investigated SPDX
> notation, is that, at *that time*, they didn't provide all the
> notations for the most used free/libre software license and it's
> variants, that is: GNU AGPL/GPL. If I recall correctly, the
> notations missing are: for versions 2+, 3+ and combinations of both
> additional terms and exception variants of 2+ and 3+. In spite of
> this, SPDX has notations for versions 2 and 3 ("only").

De-lurking (hi everyone ;) to clarify this, but the SPDX does support
“or later” grants via a ‘+’ operator and additional terms and
exceptions via a ‘WITH’ operator.  For example, you can have content
under the GPL-2.0+, which is “The GPL-2.0 license or (at your option)
and later version”.  The current docs for this aren't particularly
pretty [1], but I have work in flight to polish them up [2].  And the
‘+’ operator dates back to version 2.0 (2015), which introduced
license expressions [3].  Before that (since 1.0) there were
short-identifiers for GPL-2.0+ and similar [4].  Those identifiers are
still around (although they are now deprecated in favor of the WITH
forms) [5].

Also potentially interesting for this thread is my very recent attempt
to provide FSF license metadata via an API [6].  I'd really like to
see the FSF provide that metadata via a canonical API (similar to the
one I've mocked up or not, as they see fit).

Cheers,
Trevor

[1]: https://spdx.org/spdx-specification-21-web-version#h.jxpfx0ykyb60
[2]: https://github.com/spdx/spdx-spec/pull/37
[3]: https://spdx.org/sites/cpstandard/files/pages/files/spdx-2.0.pdf#page=9
[4]: https://spdx.org/sites//cpstandard/files/pages/files/spdx-1.0.pdf#page=35
[5]: https://spdx.org/spdx-specification-21-web-version#h.thzxydww9yu7
[6]: https://github.com/wking/fsf-api

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