Licensing content for your capsule

[Steve Winslow]

On Wed, Nov 04, 2020 at 03:00:21PM -0500, John Cowan wrote:
> On Wed, Nov 4, 2020 at 6:35 AM marc <marcx2 at welz.org.za> wrote:
> 
> Also, even though the list of licenses they have collected is
> > long, I can't spot (and let me know if otherwise)
> > any newer ethical licenses - the ones one
> > can find by following links on writing.kemitchell.com
> 
> 
> The first sentence on that page says: "The SPDX License List is a list of
> commonly found licenses and exceptions used in free and open source and
> other collaborative software or documentation."  That excludes licenses
> that are not commonly used and those that are not free/open source
> licenses.  SPDX looks through various sources to determine what's commonly
> used, but probably can't find anything that's not on the Web.  It defers to
> the OSI and the FSF to determine what is a free and open source license,
> though it does make its own judgments of the form "Oh, this is the same as
> the 2-clause BSD" and includes them.

Thanks marc, and thanks John for the details. One more point to clarify:

Earlier this year SPDX updated its guidelines to permit the inclusion on the
list of _some_ source-available licenses that don't meet OSI / FSF requirements
for their respective definitions. The guidelines are at [1] if you are
interested.

Under the revised guidelines, a few licenses that have been called "ethical
source" licenses are on the list. For instance, the Hippocratic License 2.1
was added to the list earlier this year. [2] As John noted, the SPDX community
does not aim to establish its own definitions for terms like free or open 
source software, and tries to defer to other groups that are focused on those
topics.

I realize I've taken things far afield from Gemini, so I'll hold off from
further licensing trivia on this list  :)  Happy to chat offline if folks
have questions about any of this.

Steve

[1] https://github.com/spdx/license-list-XML/blob/master/DOCS/license-inclusion-principles.md
[2] https://spdx.org/licenses/Hippocratic-2.1.html