Proposal: Allow REUSE compatible License Statements in License Policy

[Cornelius Schumacher]

On Sunday, 5 January 2020 16:40:20 CET Andreas Cord-Landwehr wrote:
> Hi, I want to propose to allow SPDX-based [5] and REUSE.software [1]
> compatible license statements as a new option in our KDE licensing policy.

This is great. Thanks for working on this. Very nicely done.

> Here is my policy update proposal:
> * Proposal:
> https://community.kde.org/Policies/Licensing_Policy/Draft_SPDX_v2 * Diff to
> current policy: https://community.kde.org/index.php?
> title=Policies%2FLicensing_Policy%2FDraft_SPDX_v2&type=revision&diff=87138&o
> ldid=87134
> 
> I would be very happy to receive feedback if this proposal goes into the
> right direction and if we shall go forward this way. Also (mostly for the
> legal experts), I would be glad if you could carefully read the
> LicenseRef-KDE- Accepted-LGPL and LicenseRef-KDE-Accepted-GPL statements
> and give me feedback. Those are based on our current license statements but
> try to better integrate with the SPDX based license statements.

In general I think the proposal makes a lot of sense. It definitely is going 
into the right direction.

Regarding the LicenseRef-KDE-Accepted-(L)GPL texts:

* What's the exact reasons for changing them compared to our current license 
statements? I tend to think it's better to keep them as they are and leave the 
versions in. Otherwise they are missing the reference to what "later" is 
relative to.
* The texts are not meant to be used as license headers in source files but as 
stand-alone files, so the refeence in a SPDX identifier such as "LGPL-2.1-only 
OR LGPL-3.0-only OR LicenseRef-KDE-Accepted-LGPL" can be resolved. Maybe that 
could be made more explicit in the policy. Maybe by moving them to the end as 
an appendix with an explanation how these are to be stored as files according 
to SPDX and REUSE conventions. Then the LicenseRef* identifiers in the bullet 
points in the policy could maybe also turned into hyperlinks pointing to these 
sections in the appendix.

It would also be nice to have examples for license headers which don't use the 
full text of the headers but only the SPDX identifiers as specified by REUSE. 
This is the more concise version and I think the one we would like to settle 
on longer term. So it would be good to have explicit examples which show how 
this will look like. That could be a later step, though.

-- 
Cornelius Schumacher <schumacher at kde.org>