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Address case sensitivity for license expressions
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This commit attempts to reflect the outcome of the discussion at
spdx#63 regarding whether
license expression operators and identifiers should be matched in
a case-sensitive manner.

Specifically it attempts to reflect the comment at
spdx#63 (comment)
regarding the outcome of the tech team discussion on 2018-06-05.

Signed-off-by: Steve Winslow <steve@swinslow.net>
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swinslow committed Mar 24, 2020
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8 changes: 8 additions & 0 deletions chapters/appendix-IV-SPDX-license-expressions.md
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Expand Up @@ -41,6 +41,14 @@ A valid `<license-expression>` string consists of either:

There MUST NOT be whitespace between a license-id and any following `+`. This supports easy parsing and backwards compatibility. There MUST be whitespace on either side of the operator "WITH". There MUST be whitespace and/or parentheses on either side of the operators `AND` and `OR`.

## Case sensitivity <a name="case-sensitivity"></a>

License expression operators (`AND`, `OR` and `WITH`) should be matched in a *case-sensitive* manner.

License identifiers used in SPDX documents or source code files should be matched in a *case-insensitive* manner. In other words, `MIT`, `Mit` and `mIt` should all be treated as the same identifier and referring to the same license.

However, please be aware that it is often important to match with the case of the canonical license identifier on the [SPDX License List](https://spdx.org/licenses). This is because the canonical identifier's case is used in the URL of the license's entry on the List, and because the canonical identifier is translated to a URI in RDF documents.

## Simple License Expressions <a name="simple-expr"></a>

A simple `<license-expression>` is composed one of the following:
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