On 2017-12-19, Bernhard Voelker
When using it upstream: is this initiative of the FSF coordinated e.g. with the GNU standards? I didn't see any discussion about "SPDX-License-Identifier"s on the GNU mailing lists.
It's an initiative of the FSFE, the European sister organisation :) There has been no coordination with the FSF/GNU yet. I'm also not subscribed to the GNU mailing lists. Is this a good place to bring up the initiative? I do not want to seem the part of a spammy intruder, in truth!
Well, you can try there, but this will probably start a bike-shedding discussion. Maybe it's better to send an email to RMS and the folks at the FSF in Boston first ... licensing is tricky and usually beyond of what the average hacker is able to care about.
Note that FSFE has done their fair share of licensing and legal work[1], so they're not just a bunch of "average hacker(s)" in this field. They also do far more work in policy than the FSF proper these days. SPDX-License-Identifier has also been worked on by the LF legal teams as well, as part of the Linux kernel work to add these headers to all files. [1]: https://fsfe.org/activities/ftf/activities.en.html -- Aleksa Sarai Senior Software Engineer (Containers) SUSE Linux GmbH https://www.cyphar.com/