Posted by Jilayne Lovejoy on March 23rd, 2012 in Legal & Compliance, Scanning & Provisioning
The SPDX License List is just one part of a larger effort to make reporting open source software licensing information more efficient and thus ease license compliance. As an active member of the SPDX legal work group, it began as a simple matter of raising my hand that I took on the task of ‘keeper of the list.’ Or so it seemed.
When I began working at OpenLogic, my first task was to read all the most commonly used open source licenses, analyze the license requirements, and help create the framework which would become the OLEX Open Source License Compliance module to our scanner. This necessarily brought up some tangential questions. Do we have this license already in our database and, if so, is it truly the same license? At what point does it become a different license? What is considered part of the license text and what isn’t? What should the license be called? How should the formatting look when the license is displayed on the page? Later, my role would evolve to include using our product to perform open source audit services for our customers. There is nothing like drinking your own Kool-Aid to encourage improvements at the macro and microscopic level.
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