Adoption of open source software is dependent on being able to communicate license information. With some of the open source packages and distributions containing hundreds of contributions and a wide variety of licenses, having a consistent and precise way of communicating the licenses is a challenge that the SPDX workgroup 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 number of new open source tools being developed that you might want to know about!