Unique identifier for licenses

[Mathieu Gervais (IDEAS)]

Many thanks for the reply. That's an interesting suggestion.
On the other hand, I'm a bit worried that these short form names don't
appear anywhere on opensource.org.
Any chances OSI could add them to
http://www.opensource.org/licenses/alphabetical ? i.e. after the license
name, have "(short-form = XXX)"
That would eliminate the reliance on another party that might diverge or
just not be updated when there is a license added by OSI.
I know this creates an admin burden, but given these guys seems to have done
most of the legwork, I think it would actually be a worthy addition to OSI's
offering (small, but with value).
(should I send this request to another particular group? I'm hoping OSI
folks are reading this list...)

Thanks,

-mathieu


On Mon, Apr 18, 2011 at 12:09, David Dillard <david_dillard at symantec.com>wrote:

> You might try using the short form identifiers for licenses as found in the
> SPDX spec (see Appendix I).
>
>
>
> http://spdx.org/system/files/spdx-v1beta.draft20100807_1.pdf
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> *From:* Mathieu Gervais (IDEAS) [mailto:Mathieu.Gervais at morganstanley.com]
>
> *Sent:* Monday, April 18, 2011 9:14 AM
> *To:* license-discuss at opensource.org
> *Subject:* Unique identifier for licenses
>
>
>
> Hi,
>
> We are improving internal tooling to keep track of open source libraries
> licenses.
> What do you recommend in order to uniquely identify licenses?
>
> We want to leverage OSI's catalogue of licenses in order to not reinvent
> the wheel, but it doesn't look like a slam dunk since the naming is not that
> consistent.
> For example, for BSD the name seen on these 2 pages is different:
>
>     http://www.opensource.org/licenses/alphabetical
>
>     http://www.opensource.org/licenses/bsd-license
> (I prefer the one on the alphabetical list, since it does hint which flavor
> of BSD we are talking about -- "new and simplified").
>
> So the question is, what would be the best/recommended (short) identifier
> that is likely to stay stable?
> I see the following choices:
>  a) name as listed on  http://www.opensource.org/licenses/alphabetical
>  b) name as listed on the license page itself: e.g.
> http://www.opensource.org/licenses/bsd-license
>
>  ( this seems a non starter given that not all page have the same format,
> some of them have the license name written as "Open Source Initiative OSI -
> * license name*:Licensing" (see bsd), some have just the license name
> (e.g. AGPL)
>
>  c)use the short name in the url of the license itself, i.e.:
>
> http://www.opensource.org/licenses/*bsd-license   => use license
> name="bsd-license"*
>
> http://www.opensource.org/licenses/*mit-license   => use license
> name="mit-license"*
>
> http://www.opensource.org/licenses/*gpl-2.0* *   => use license
> name="gpl-2.0"*
>
>
> Although we could use full URLs, I'd prefer using a short, meaningful name.
> (the full URL would really amount to option c anyway).
>
> I'm not going to hold it against you if this ever changes, but I'd like to
> know that I at least have a shot at using something that is likely to be *relatively
> *stable for the foreseeable future.
> It also seems to me adding this to the FAQ could make sense since I'm
> certainly not the only one trying to refer to licenses in your catalogue.
>
> I understand this is a bit nitpicking, but since we are doing this, we
> might as well try to do it right.
>
> Let me know if my question is not clear and thanks in advance for your
> help.
>
> -mathieu
>
> PS: ultimately we *do *store and refer to the actual license txt included
> in the distribution of each library, but this is for the purpose of
> categorization in our internal repository.
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.opensource.org/pipermail/license-discuss_lists.opensource.org/attachments/20110418/29471f30/attachment.html>