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</o:shapelayout></xml><![endif]--></head><body lang=EN-US link=blue vlink=purple><div class=WordSection1><p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:11.0pt;font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif";color:#1F497D'>You might try using the short form identifiers for licenses as found in the SPDX spec (see Appendix I).<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:11.0pt;font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif";color:#1F497D'><o:p> </o:p></span></p><p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:11.0pt;font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif";color:#1F497D'><a href="http://spdx.org/system/files/spdx-v1beta.draft20100807_1.pdf">http://spdx.org/system/files/spdx-v1beta.draft20100807_1.pdf</a><o:p></o:p></span></p><p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:11.0pt;font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif";color:#1F497D'><o:p> </o:p></span></p><p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:11.0pt;font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif";color:#1F497D'><o:p> </o:p></span></p><p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:11.0pt;font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif";color:#1F497D'><o:p> </o:p></span></p><div style='border:none;border-top:solid #B5C4DF 1.0pt;padding:3.0pt 0in 0in 0in'><p class=MsoNormal><b><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:"Tahoma","sans-serif"'>From:</span></b><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:"Tahoma","sans-serif"'> Mathieu Gervais (IDEAS) [mailto:Mathieu.Gervais@morganstanley.com] <br><b>Sent:</b> Monday, April 18, 2011 9:14 AM<br><b>To:</b> license-discuss@opensource.org<br><b>Subject:</b> Unique identifier for licenses<o:p></o:p></span></p></div><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>Hi,<br><br>We are improving internal tooling to keep track of open source libraries licenses.<br>What do you recommend in order to uniquely identify licenses?<br><br>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.<br>For example, for BSD the name seen on these 2 pages is different: <o:p></o:p></p><div><p class=MsoNormal> <a href="http://www.opensource.org/licenses/alphabetical" target="_blank">http://www.opensource.org/licenses/alphabetical</a><o:p></o:p></p></div><div><p class=MsoNormal> <a href="http://www.opensource.org/licenses/bsd-license" target="_blank">http://www.opensource.org/licenses/bsd-license</a><br>(I prefer the one on the alphabetical list, since it does hint which flavor of BSD we are talking about -- "new and simplified").<br><br>So the question is, what would be the best/recommended (short) identifier that is likely to stay stable?<br>I see the following choices:<br> a) name as listed on <a href="http://www.opensource.org/licenses/alphabetical" target="_blank">http://www.opensource.org/licenses/alphabetical</a><br> b) name as listed on the license page itself: e.g. <a href="http://www.opensource.org/licenses/bsd-license" target="_blank">http://www.opensource.org/licenses/bsd-license</a><o:p></o:p></p><div style='margin-left:24.0pt'><p class=MsoNormal> ( 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 -<i> license name</i>:Licensing" (see bsd), some have just the license name (e.g. AGPL)<o:p></o:p></p></div><p class=MsoNormal> c)use the short name in the url of the license itself, i.e.: <o:p></o:p></p><div style='margin-left:24.0pt'><p class=MsoNormal><a href="http://www.opensource.org/licenses/" target="_blank">http://www.opensource.org/licenses/</a><b>bsd-license => use license name="bsd-license"</b><o:p></o:p></p></div><div style='margin-left:24.0pt'><p class=MsoNormal><a href="http://www.opensource.org/licenses/" target="_blank">http://www.opensource.org/licenses/</a><b>mit-license => use license name="mit-license"</b><o:p></o:p></p></div><div style='margin-left:24.0pt'><p class=MsoNormal><a href="http://www.opensource.org/licenses/" target="_blank">http://www.opensource.org/licenses/</a><b>gpl-2.0</b> <b> => use license name="gpl-2.0"</b><o:p></o:p></p></div></div><p class=MsoNormal><br>Although we could use full URLs, I'd prefer using a short, meaningful name. (the full URL would really amount to option c anyway).<br><br>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 <i>relatively </i>stable for the foreseeable future.<br>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.<br><br>I understand this is a bit nitpicking, but since we are doing this, we might as well try to do it right. <br><br>Let me know if my question is not clear and thanks in advance for your help.<br><span style='color:#888888'><br clear=all>-mathieu<br></span><br>PS: ultimately we <i>do </i>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.<o:p></o:p></p></div></body></html>