[License-discuss] [Infrastructure] Machine readable source of OSI approved licenses?

Karl Fogel kfogel at opensource.org
Thu Dec 19 22:46:34 UTC 2013


Joe Murray <joe.murray at jmaconsulting.biz> writes:
>What I really want help with is someone to a) proofread the text that
>I change from html to text, and b) to provide feedback / direction on
>matters like whether it would be okay to create separate nodes with
>different names for version x and version x or later licenses on
>opensource.org. 

A technical suggestion:

If we use Markdown as the plaintext format -- which would be reasonable,
as every license I can think of would look fine both as Markdown source
text and as HTML rendered from that -- then we can just use Drupal's
Markdown format as the default format for all licenses.  This would
enable us to use the same underlying source for both on-site HTML and
plaintext versions.

Right now, our licenses are all in "Full HTML" format.  For example, if
you go to

  http://opensource.org/licenses/Apache-2.0

and and click on Edit (you'll need to be logged in), you'll see that

  http://opensource.org/node/41/edit

is set to "Full HTML".  What I'm proposing is that we redo them all as
"Markdown" instead, such that

  http://opensource.org/licenses/Apache-2.0

still looks basically as it does now (Drupal will render the Markdown as
HTML), but if someone visits a special URL, then they get the raw
Markdown source, which happens to be a good plaintext version of the
license.

That special URL would be something like one of these:

  http://opensource.org/licenses/txt/Apache-2.0
  http://opensource.org/licenses/Apache-2.0.txt
  http://opensource.org/licenses/Apache-2.0.md

(I'm not sure which one I prefer; this is just to give you an idea.)

Some custom coding -- maybe a new module that we release? -- would be
necessary to achieve this, but the benefit over time would be big: we
only need to maintain one master source for every license.

I don't have experience writing Drupal modules, but from an admin and
user perspective, the above achieves our goals I think.

-Karl



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