Re: copyright-format: "with <keywords> exception" underspecified

[Jonathan Nieder <jrnieder@gmail.com>]

Steve Langasek wrote:

> However, the history of the draft shows that people are concerned
> about knowing whether *specific* common exceptions are in effect

Good point.  For example, the "GPL-2 with OpenSSL exception" and
"OpenSSL" licenses are compatible, while GPL-2 and the OpenSSL
licenses are not.

[...]
> I have a slight preference for:
>
>    GPL-2+ with OpenSSL and Font exceptions
>
> because it's both easy to parse and reads naturally in English.

Sounds fine to me.  FWIW the only event that I can imagine making me
care one way or another is if someone implementing a parser finds some
particular syntax difficult to parse.

So that means, roughly:

	Exceptions are signaled by including "with <keywords>
	exceptions" at the end of the short name.  The word
	"exception" or "exceptions" can be used.  Each keyword must be
	a single word (see the list below for standard exception
	keywords), and the list of keywords is formatted as a list of
	words separated by "and".

	Example license field

	License: GPL-2+ with OpenSSL and Font and GCC-Runtime-Library exceptions

The above rough text says 'including at the end' of the short name
instead of 'appending' because the file needs a stand-alone License
paragraph describing the license including exceptions unless the
License field included an explanation after the short name.

I didn't define what "a single word" means but I imagine in the final
text we might want to, to avoid being able to misparse the above
example as listing only two exceptions --- one called "OpenSSL and
Font", and the other called "GCC-Runtime-Library".