Discrepancy in LGPL-2.1-only & LGPL-2.0-only 'Notes' re file header example.

[phillxnet]

• At https://spdx.org/licenses/LGPL-2.1-only.html we have, under the "Notes" subheading:

The license notice (as seen in the Standard License Header field below) states which of these applies to the code in the file. The example in the exhibit to the license shows the license notice for the "or later" approach.

Likely copied from the actual "or later" page at: https://spdx.org/licenses/LGPL-2.1-or-later.html

But the file header example given correctly indicates no such clause.

So this looks like a simple cut-paste of the "Notes" section from the or-later variant.

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• Similarly the above "Notes" typo also pertains to: https://spdx.org/licenses/LGPL-2.0-only.html

[jlovejoy]

okay, so I was thinking this was a good catch and started to make a PR to fix it and then realized... this wording was intentional, but not entirely clear.

The standard header shown at https://spdx.org/licenses/LGPL-2.1-only.html shows it as "only" - the sentence in the Note stating, "The example in the exhibit to the license shows the license notice for the "or later" approach." is meant to refer to the example in the exhibit of the standard license that you see on the FSF website, etc. I believe we added this to try to clarify some confusion in the opposite direction (as to why the header shown on the SPDX page is not the same as on the FSF site), as well a recognition of the reality that if you really want to apply the "only" version option, you must alter the standard header text that is in the standard license exhibit.

But... it's hard to explain that in a concise way and I can see where the last sentence in the Note could be interpreted different ways. I don't have a good idea of how to re-word it right now, but will keep the PR open in the hopes someone can suggest something here and then I'll update the PR!

(This is the same situation in the GPL-2.0-only Notes field)

[richardfontana]

Just looking at this for the first time, I'm puzzled at why SPDX calls that a "Standard License Header". It's not standard at all; much as most other FOSS licenses have no standard license header, there is no standard license header for the *GPL-only license grants, because the license steward (FSF) doesn't recommend use of "-only", and there's no other authoritative source for what a "standard license header" would be other than the license steward itself. Essentially, it seems SPDX is asserting itself as being authorized to designate what a standard license header is for a particular license in the absence of any official statement from the license steward or even some demonstrable community consensus.