Version 3.x doesn’t talk about SPDX license list short identifiers

[Jayman2000]

Version 2.3 of the SPDX Specification has an annex named “Annex E Using SPDX license list short identifiers in source files (Informative)”. That annex describes how to use SPDX-License-Identifier: to declare licensing information inside of files. Version 3.0.1 of the SPDX Specification doesn’t seem to talk about SPDX license list short identifiers at all. It would be nice if an annex about SPDX license list short identifiers was added to SPDX 3.x.

I personally use SPDX license list short identifiers all the time because the REUSE Spcification requires it. The REUSE Specification uses version 2.3 of the SPDX Specification at the moment. REUSE probably can’t be updated to use SPDX 3.x until SPDX 3.x has a section on SPDX license list short identifiers.

[bact]

As an informative document, it is moved out of the spec distribution and placed here https://github.com/spdx/using/blob/main/docs%2Fusing-SPDX-short-identifiers-in-source-files.md

[bact]

But it is an interesting question if we can use the license short identifier as an spdxId of a license object and expect the SPDX 3 consumer to interpret it the way SPDX 2 does.