Dear Keith, I came across your email whilst browsing the archives for this mailing list. Hopefully this message might still be useful to you despite the somewhat delayed response! :)
On Sun, Mar 21, 2021 at 05:09:14PM -0700, Keith Packard wrote: > We were happily reviewing a licensing update in some X.org code and > came across a discrepancy between the 'MIT' license as published on > opensource.org and the current best-practices 'MIT' license as used by > X.org projects and as described by the SPDX license text. > ... > The parenthetical clause, ?(including the next paragraph),? was added > as a result of discussions between various stakeholders as referenced > here: > > https://lists.x.org/archives/xorg/2007-July/026300.html Automatic license checkers that follow the SPDX License List Matching Guidelines ( https://spdx.dev/license-list/matching-guidelines ) should identify both the X.org and the OSI variant as 'MIT', because the markup for the MIT license in the source repository has the extra clause wrapped in an <optional> tag: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/spdx/license-list-XML/master/src/MIT.xml <p>The above copyright notice and this permission notice <optional>(including the next paragraph)</optional>shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.</p> That is, what SPDX calls the 'MIT' license is intended to describe both of the variants that you quoted, although other variants that differ more substantially have their own SPDX identifiers. Granted, it is a larger difference that the optional tag is usually used for; it is more often employed for marking minor formatting such as bullet points and numbering. As the inclusion of this clause predates my involvement with SPDX, I can only provide a GitHub issue for context of the decision to use <optional> for that clause! https://github.com/spdx/license-list-XML/issues/729 I hope I've been able to provide some clarification on this. Please feel free to respond (either on-list or personally) if you have any other questions about SPDX, and I shall endeavour to answer them! Best wishes, Sebastian PS. Keep up the great work with X.org! I found your recent interview on the FLOSS Weekly podcast very inspirational. _______________________________________________ The opinions expressed in this email are those of the sender and not necessarily those of the Open Source Initiative. Official statements by the Open Source Initiative will be sent from an opensource.org email address. License-discuss mailing list License-discuss@lists.opensource.org http://lists.opensource.org/mailman/listinfo/license-discuss_lists.opensource.org
