Adoption of open source software, especially by commercial enterprises, is dependent on being able to communicate the licenses for the open source software. With some of the open source packages and distributions containing hundreds of different contributions with a wide variety of licenses, having a consistent way of communicating the licenses in a precise way is a challenge that the SPDX organization has taken on.
If you are a developer and want to take advantage of SPDX in your own code, you may well take a look at the spec and come away with the impression that it is large, complex, and difficult to implement.
Fortunately, it is much easier than you may think. There are some easy ways to get started by just using the SPDX license identifiers in your code. There are also a significant number of new open source tools being developed including plug-ins to build environments and IDE extensions.
I'll show you an easy way to start using SPDX in your own code and in your own organization.
