Proposal: Allow REUSE compatible License Statements in License Policy

[Andreas Cord-Landwehr]

On Montag, 6. Januar 2020 23:43:29 CET Cornelius Schumacher wrote:
[...]
> 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.

Hi Cornelius, thanks for your comments!

Regarding the license statements for the "accecpted by KDE" clause: My main 
motivation was to introduce a workaround with some licensing mixups we have in 
our repositories. For example (there are many more, these are only the first in 
my list):
- LGPL-2.0-only OR LGPL 3.0-only OR LicenseRef-KDE-Accepted-LGPL:
  https://github.com/KDE/kio/blob/master/autotests/kfilecopytomenutest.cpp
-  LGPL-2.1-only OR LGPL 3.0-only OR LicenseRef-KDE-Accepted-LGPL:
  https://github.com/KDE/attica/blob/master/src/projectparser.cpp
So, there are two LGPL based licenses with the same accepted-by-KDE clause, 
which relies on the LGPL-3 clause for defining a proxy. Yet, they state 
different LGPL-2.* versions, once LGPL-2.0-only and once LGPL-2.1-only. The KDE 
clause -- in my opinion -- does not need this distinction, as it only relates 
to the LGPL-3 version for defining is meaning.
So another option would be to define that later versions of the LGPL-3.0 are 
meant. This should not change any meaning of the current license statements. 
What do you think?

Regarding the second point: I fully agree and will do this. And I want to do 
this together with examples how to state the licenses correctly. However, I 
think, stating the examples for REUSE compatible license usage should best be 
put on a separate wiki page for better readability.

Cheers,
Andreas