Persistent copyright & licensing information in client-side JavaScript, CSS and similar – feedback and second proposal

At FOSDEM 2025 I presented my (intentionally controversial) proposal how to keep copyright and licensing info in minified JS/CSS and asked for feedback, including from front-end developers. Two months later, I took the feedback from FOSDEM and held a small workshop session with a group consisting of OSPO leaders, FOSS lawyers and a handful of FOSS developers at LLW 2025. This blog post was finished1 more than a year after both, so I will not be summarizing my FOSDEM talk, and suggest you listen to it (esp. the Q&A part), if you are interested in the details. But I will summarize the results of both sessions below. Are SDPX IDs enough for compliance or not (given their templating)¶ Someone argued that for certain licenses – specifically, e.g. the MIT and BSD family – even the SPDX License List has a some templating in place, and as such identifying it with just an SPDX ID would not fulfil the license obligations, by strict reading of the license. That is a concern that I identified…