[tz] Use or Apply for SPDX Licence

[Ralph Schaffner]

On Mon, 2020-06-22 at 22:51 -0400, Tom Lane wrote:
> "Philip Paeps" <philip at trouble.is> writes:
> > Unfortunately, I don't think it's practical to retroactively apply
> > a CC0 
> > tag.  Formally, you'd need each individual contributor to
> > agree.  Given 
> > the age of the tz project, this may be impossible.
> 
> Yeah, that.
> 
> FWIW, we've had roughly comparable discussions in the Postgres
> project.
> The existing PG copyright is a mess: it's sloppily worded and it
> protects nobody except the University of California.  But we've
> concluded that changing it is effectively impossible, because there's
> no way to get the concurrence of every past contributor.  And that
> conclusion was arrived at in 2000 ... so it'd be that much worse now.
> 
> In practice, the amount of interest in changing the license wording
> has
> dropped to about nothing since 2000, too.  People are far more used
> to
> the concept of community-owned open source code than they were then,
> and the fact that the governing document is loosely phrased bothers
> nobody now other than perhaps some bean-counters.
> 
> In short, I think politely ignoring SPDX is the right thing to do.
> It's trying to solve a problem that was real enough twenty years
> ago, but people have gotten over it.
> 
> 			regards, tom lane

Actually, the point of SPDX is to create unique tags for existing
licenses, not to create or change the licenses that a project is
released under. This is meant to make identification of licenses used
easier to identify in a more consistent way. Think automation.

As a matter of fact Postgresql already has a SPDX tag. :)
https://spdx.org/licenses/PostgreSQL.html

For an example of how SPDX might be used you can look at Opensuse. The
rpm spec files are expected to have an SPDX tag for the License value.

https://en.opensuse.org/openSUSE:Packaging_guidelines#Spec_Files

As the Packaging Guidelines state, the SPDX is "relatively" new so
there aren't valid tags for all licenses yet. It looks like currently
Opensuse marks the timezone rpms as "BSD-3-Clause AND SUSE-Public-
Domain"

https://build.opensuse.org/package/view_file/Base:System/timezone/timez
one.spec?expand=1


Ralph Schaffner