<div dir="ltr"><div style="font-family:arial,sans-serif;font-size:12.800000190734863px">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 <a href="http://opensource.org">opensource.org</a> - 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. <a href="http://spdx.org/licenses/">http://spdx.org/licenses/</a> 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.</div>
<div style="font-family:arial,sans-serif;font-size:12.800000190734863px"><br></div><div style="font-family:arial,sans-serif;font-size:12.800000190734863px">Background:</div><div style="font-family:arial,sans-serif;font-size:12.800000190734863px">
CiviCRM would like the set of licenses in this form in order to ensure that any extensions that we list on <a href="http://civicrm.org/" target="_blank">civicrm.org</a> and provide auto-download services for via <a href="http://civicrm.org/" target="_blank">civicrm.org</a> are using licenses approved by OSI. However, the request seems of broader interest. Karl Fogel suggested I pose it to these two lists.</div>
<div style="font-family:arial,sans-serif;font-size:12.800000190734863px"><br></div><div style="font-family:arial,sans-serif;font-size:12.800000190734863px">CiviCRM decided to try to up its game with respect to licensing of its extensions partly as a result of someone coming across <a href="http://www.zdnet.com/github-improves-open-source-licensing-polices-7000018213/" target="_blank">http://www.zdnet.com/github-improves-open-source-licensing-polices-7000018213/</a>. While early on most <a href="http://civicrm.org/" target="_blank">civicrm.org</a> listed extensions were hosted on <a href="http://drupal.org/" target="_blank">drupal.org</a> 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.</div>
<div style="font-family:arial,sans-serif;font-size:12.800000190734863px"><br></div><div style="font-family:arial,sans-serif;font-size:12.800000190734863px">Possible implementation strategy:<br></div><div style="font-family:arial,sans-serif;font-size:12.800000190734863px">
If OSI decides it would like to do this, it may be technically as simple as copying the licenses on <a href="http://opensource.org">opensource.org</a> from one type of node to another, then doing a bit of cleanup to support some requirements for automated use. Looking at <a href="http://opensource.org/" target="_blank">opensource.org</a>, 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. </div>
<div style="font-family:arial,sans-serif;font-size:12.800000190734863px"><br></div><div style="font-family:arial,sans-serif;font-size:12.800000190734863px">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. <span style="font-family:arial;font-size:small">If the approved licenses on <a href="http://opensource.org">opensource.org</a> 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.</span></div>
<div style="font-family:arial,sans-serif;font-size:12.800000190734863px"><br></div><div><span style="font-family:arial,sans-serif;font-size:12.800000190734863px">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 </span><font face="arial, sans-serif"><a href="http://opensource.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.html#howto">http://opensource.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.html#howto</a>, and the differences between the </font>'How to Apply These Terms to Your New Programs' sections of <a href="http://spdx.org/licenses/GPL-3.0">http://spdx.org/licenses/GPL-3.0</a> and <a href="http://spdx.org/licenses/GPL-3.0+">http://spdx.org/licenses/GPL-3.0+</a>). 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. </div>
<div style="font-family:arial,sans-serif;font-size:12.800000190734863px"><br></div><div style="font-family:arial,sans-serif;font-size:12.800000190734863px">I am willing to volunteer with doing some of the implementation work if a decision is made to provide this new service.</div>
<div style="font-family:arial,sans-serif;font-size:12.800000190734863px"><br></div><div>Joe Murray, PhD<br>President, JMA Consulting<br><a href="mailto:joe.murray@jmaconsulting.biz" target="_blank">joe.murray@jmaconsulting.biz</a><br>
skype JosephPMurray twitter JoeMurray<br>416.466.1281</div>
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