On 12/7/23 02:55, John Cowan wrote:
>
> The MIT license text plainly says (emphasis added) "The above copyright
> notice and this permission notice (including the next paragraph) *shall*
> be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software."  It
> does not say that a link to an outboard copy of the license is an
> adequate substitute for this requirement: the word "shall" implies that
> the requirement must be followed as written.
>

I think an expressed preference of actual SRFI authors to keep the full
license comments as they are is a more than sufficient reason to do so.

Just in an attempt at clarity, I'd distinguish three courses of action
one might consider:

1. Add SPDX metadata, but do not remove anything. I'm not aware of any
objections to this course of action.

2. Add SPDX metadata and remove existing comments, leaving the full text
of the MIT license nowhere. For the reasons John explains, this course
of action would seem to violate the requirements of the MIT license. (It
would be different if the original author included only SPDX comments,
as some people now do.)

3. Add SPDX metadata and move the full text of the MIT license to a
separate file distributed alongside the original file. This at least
arguably could satisfy the requirements of the license: for example,
copies of MIT-licensed software in compiled form often move the required
text to a separate file. However, some people do have concerns about
this approach. In my last email I wrote that it has the advantage that
readers don't have to determine if the text is exactly the standard
text, but it also has the disadvantage that copiers must be sure to also
copy the separate file for the license.

So, "add SPDX metadata, but do not remove anything" seems like the
safest course of action.

>
> The proposed patch to SRFI 119, which is the only one I've seen so far,
> also changes certain existing ";;" comments into ";;;;" comments.  That
> violates a strong convention of the Scheme (and indeed the wider Lisp)
> community that comments with four semicolons represent outline
> headings.  See <https://mumble.net/~campbell/scheme/style.txt
> <https://mumble.net/~campbell/scheme/style.txt>> s.v. "Outline
> Headings".  Therefore, this change should be undone.

I also noticed the changed number of semicolons and agree that it should
not be changed, my last email was just getting a bit long already.

Philip