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Add `PROPRIETARY` to the license expression syntax
I created this ticket in order to keep the discussion in #49 focused to NONE and move the discussion about PROPRIETARY here.
With the current status quo it is not possible to express a dual license like GPL-2.0 OR PROPRIETARY, which is a common practice in the industry.
There have been workarounds by users of SPDX, like adding UNLICENSED in npm.
But even the UNLICENSED workaround does not consider the dual license case.
Welcome, @AldoMX!
ping for @swinslow and @jlovejoy (the SPDX Legal Team leads).
Hi @AldoMX, thanks for asking this separately from the discussion about NONE in the other issue.
There is no single definition of what a "proprietary" license is or is not, so a general "PROPRIETARY" identifier defined in the license expression syntax would not be appropriate.
For licenses not on the SPDX license list, the appropriate way to identify them is with a LicenseRef- prefix for a custom license. See https://spdx.github.io/spdx-spec/other-licensing-information-detected/ and https://spdx.github.io/spdx-spec/SPDX-license-expressions/ for more details.
If downstream consumers of the SPDX license list such as npm have added their own non-compliant identifiers such as UNLICENSED, that's on them, and I suppose they're welcome to do the same thing for PROPRIETARY if they choose for their own ecosystem. But I wouldn't be in favor of incorporating this into the SPDX license expression syntax.
I think part of the idea for PROPRIETARY is that it should be used when an organization is not willing to provide any text for a possible license they may offer for the software in question, because the terms of that license would be determined through direct negotiation. So a LicenseRef- prefix for a custom license would be of minimal value because the custom license would likely say something along the lines of "contact us for license terms" anyway.
I'd like to +1 this issue. It would be nice to have a way, especially for internally owned components that aren't licensed, to assert that no license exists for this component and that's expected.
FWIW, I raised this issue here: https://github.com/spdx/license-list-XML/issues/1856 and it was ultimately rejected.
Given discussion in https://github.com/spdx/license-list-XML/issues/1856, I'm going to mark this as closed.