Proposal: Allow REUSE compatible License Statements in License Policy

[Andreas Cord-Landwehr]

Thanks for the detailed remarks! I will comment on them inline of the mail:

> One thing that is not entirely clear to me is what our position would
> be towards e.g. *.license files or DEP5 files as suggested by the
> REUSE spec.
> The current wording seems to suggest to me that these approaches are
> not considered. Is this deliberate or an oversight? I.e. is the REUSE
> spec the "spirit" of how implementation of licensing should be done,
> or is policy deliberately more strict in omitting such options?
I see it the same way as Mirko. IMO it is better to use only one style by 
default, which for source code files should be SPDX. For other files it might 
make sense to loosen this requirement, e.g. for icon scheme folders or other 
data folders. But right now, I mostly looked at source code files.

> This also leads to my next question: what about e.g. test data? As I
> read the draft policy, these would fall under section 15, being "other
> data files" and so should be licensed according to sections 4 or 5.
> This would seem to preclude CC-0 or even CC-BY-SA type licenses for
> test data sets. Is that also deliberate?
I read Section 15 the same way as you. However, this is a section I did not 
change and where I do not know about the historic arguments about, when it was 
changed last. For now I would prefer it keep it unchanged and maybe we should 
start a discussion after the SPDX changes are in, if what clause should be 
more flexible.

> Finally, section 6 seems to be somewhat disconnected from the rest of
> the document: section 15 does not permit for "other data" to be
> licensed under section 6, and a pedantically narrow reading of section
> 5 ("must") seems to preclude section 6 ("may") entirely.
As for Section 15, also Section 6 was not changed and I would prefer to keep 
changes in the current proposal limited to SPDX related topics to make the 
changes easier to follow. But I agree with your reading and think that it 
makes sense to refactor the overall policy to better explain the scope of the 
respective license restrictions; also to clarify the relationship of point 5 
and 6. Yet, this would also be another change of the policy IMHO, otherwise it 
would be too hard to follow changes.

Is this OK for you that we postpone the above topics for a next iteration of 
the policy? (Nothing prevents from starting a proposal just after the current 
update :) ) Otherwise, these topics would block changing the header statements 
to SPDX headers, which I would like to start sooner than later.

Cheers,
Andreas