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

Nuno Brito nuno.brito at triplecheck.de
Thu Dec 26 23:26:13 UTC 2013


Hello,

> 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 [1].
> 
> If someone wanted to c) liaise with SPDX on an RDF format or something
> for how the licenses could be made available to their tools, that
> would be cool and great for the open source world but not necessary
> for my purposes.

I'm available to help with points a), b) and c). I'm a PHP developer, no 
experience on Drupal but can help with a prototype on d).

My work involves extensive usage of SPDX during licensing compliance 
activities and this requires creating consistent definitions on our 
tooling that you find at our site [T1] for describing the licensing 
situations not yet prescribed by the SPDX working groups.

Would be glad to help.


With kind regards
Nuno Brito

[T1] http://www.triplecheck.de/download/

---
email: nuno.brito at triplecheck.de
phone:  +49 615 146 03187
twitter: @triplechecked

On 2013-12-19 16:57, Joe Murray wrote:
> Thanks, Simon.
> 
> 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 [1]. 
> 
> If someone wanted to c) liaise with SPDX on an RDF format or something
> for how the licenses could be made available to their tools, that
> would be cool and great for the open source world but not necessary
> for my purposes. 
> 
> If someone with Drupal experience d) wanted to help with the design
> and implementation that would be a bonus, but I'm ready to shoulder
> that. 
> 
>  Joe Murray, PhD
> President, JMA Consulting
> joe.murray at jmaconsulting.biz
> skype JosephPMurray twitter JoeMurray
> 416.466.1281
> 
> On Thu, Dec 19, 2013 at 10:03 AM, Simon Phipps <simon at webmink.com>
> wrote:
> 
>> This sounds useful and I'd support the idea if a group were willing
>> to make it happen. I suggest a staged implementation with the
>> "Popular Licenses" being made available first and the others set up
>> to return a placeholder message or error.
>> 
>> On Thu, Dec 19, 2013 at 2:07 AM, Joe Murray
>> <joe.murray at jmaconsulting.biz> wrote:
>> 
>>> Would it be possible for OSI to make available a machine readable
>>> list of the licenses approved by OSI? The format - a csv, xml or
>>> some other file in a repository, or a REST or some other service
>>> from opensource.org [1] - is not as important as that the content
>>> be authoritative. There may be an official specification for how
>>> software licenses should be made available, but I am not aware of
>>> it. http://spdx.org/licenses/ [2] provides a list of licenses but
>>> it too is not designed for automated use (though it might be
>>> scrapable). Ideally, it seems like the recognition of licenses by
>>> OSI should produce some output that could be used by SPDX tools,
>>> but this request is a bit simpler.
>>> 
>>> Background:
>>> CiviCRM would like the set of licenses in this form in order to
>>> ensure that any extensions that we list on civicrm.org [3] and
>>> provide auto-download services for via civicrm.org [3] are using
>>> licenses approved by OSI. However, the request seems of broader
>>> interest. Karl Fogel suggested I pose it to these two lists.
>>> 
>>> CiviCRM decided to try to up its game with respect to licensing of
>>> its extensions partly as a result of someone coming
>>> 
>> 
> across http://www.zdnet.com/github-improves-open-source-licensing-polices-7000018213/
>>> [4]. While early on most civicrm.org [3] listed extensions were
>>> hosted on drupal.org [5] and thus were guaranteed to have a GPL
>>> license, now most of our new listings are for software on github.
>>> CiviCRM would also like to 'assist' extension developers in
>>> actually including an accurate license text file in their
>>> extension by checking it is present in the extension's root
>>> directory and that its text matches what they are listing as the
>>> license. I've been asked to liaise with OSI on the availability of
>>> such a machine readable list of these licenses.
>>> 
>>> Possible implementation strategy:
>>> 
>>> If OSI decides it would like to do this, it may be technically as
>>> simple as copying the licenses on opensource.org [1] from one type
>>> of node to another, then doing a bit of cleanup to support some
>>> requirements for automated use. Looking at opensource.org [6], I
>>> see a content type was at some point created specifically for
>>> licenses, though no content has been posted of that type, and all
>>> the licenses are currently created as nodes with content
>>> type=page. 
>>> 
>>> In terms of fields for automated use, it would be useful to move
>>> the short title into its own field rather than having it in
>>> parentheses at the end of the long title, and to make a plain text
>>> version of licenses suitable for inclusion as a LICENSE.txt file
>>> in source code available in addition to the current html formatted
>>> ones. If the approved licenses on opensource.org [1] were put
>>> into suitable content types, they could easily be made available
>>> as a feed or exported periodically to a file that could be stored
>>> in an authoritative repository.
>>> 
>>> I am also trying to understand the proper way to handle headers in
>>> license files, particularly for the small number of cases where
>>> they make a difference, eg GPL-3.0 versus GPL-3.0+
>>> (see http://opensource.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.html#howto [7], and
>>> the differences between the 'How to Apply These Terms to Your New
>>> Programs' sections of http://spdx.org/licenses/GPL-3.0 [8]
>>> and http://spdx.org/licenses/GPL-3.0+ [9]). This seems like
>>> something we want to assist developers in getting right by using
>>> reasonable defaults. One possibility we are mulling over is
>>> optionally automating the creation of a LICENSE.txt file using
>>> metadata about the Author, publication date, and license and
>>> suggesting that authors use that file in their repo or request a
>>> manual review of their LICENSE.txt. It would be convenient if
>>> suggested header text for licenses was made available in machine
>>> readable form from OSI, including for the differences between
>>> 'version x only' and 'version x or later' headers. 
>>> 
>>> I am willing to volunteer with doing some of the implementation
>>> work if a decision is made to provide this new service.
>>> 
>>> Joe Murray, PhD
>>> President, JMA Consulting
>>> joe.murray at jmaconsulting.biz
>>> skype JosephPMurray twitter JoeMurray
>>> 416.466.1281 [10]
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> Infrastructure mailing list
>>> Infrastructure at opensource.org
>>> 
>> 
> http://projects.opensource.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/infrastructure
>>> [11]
>> 
>> --
>> 
>> SIMON PHIPPS  http://webmink.com [12]
>> _MESHED INSIGHTS LTD _
>> _Office:_ +1 (415) 683-7660 [13] _or_ +44 (238) 098 7027 [14]
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> 
> 
> 
> Links:
> ------
> [1] http://opensource.org
> [2] http://spdx.org/licenses/
> [3] http://civicrm.org/
> [4]
> http://www.zdnet.com/github-improves-open-source-licensing-polices-7000018213/
> [5] http://drupal.org/
> [6] http://opensource.org/
> [7] http://opensource.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.html#howto
> [8] http://spdx.org/licenses/GPL-3.0
> [9] http://spdx.org/licenses/GPL-3.0+
> [10] tel:416.466.1281
> [11] 
> http://projects.opensource.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/infrastructure
> [12] http://webmink.com/
> [13] tel:%2B1%20%28415%29%20683-7660
> [14] tel:%2B44%20%28238%29%20098%207027
> [15] tel:%2B44%20774%20776%202816
> 
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