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<font size="-2"><font face="Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif"><big><big>Could
this be a working group?</big></big></font></font><br>
<br>
<div class="moz-cite-prefix">On 12/19/2013 10:03 AM, Simon Phipps
wrote:<br>
</div>
<blockquote
cite="mid:CAA4ffp-bUqcmCFRVV1e_58sJoxk83f76_0Yd36oi+J7vdnN02A@mail.gmail.com"
type="cite">
<div dir="ltr">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.<br>
</div>
<div class="gmail_extra"><br>
<br>
<div class="gmail_quote">On Thu, Dec 19, 2013 at 2:07 AM, Joe
Murray <span dir="ltr"><<a moz-do-not-send="true"
href="mailto:joe.murray@jmaconsulting.biz" target="_blank">joe.murray@jmaconsulting.biz</a>></span>
wrote:<br>
<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0
.8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">
<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
moz-do-not-send="true" href="http://opensource.org"
target="_blank">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 moz-do-not-send="true"
href="http://spdx.org/licenses/" target="_blank">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
moz-do-not-send="true" href="http://civicrm.org/"
target="_blank">civicrm.org</a> and provide
auto-download services for via <a moz-do-not-send="true"
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 moz-do-not-send="true"
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 moz-do-not-send="true"
href="http://civicrm.org/" target="_blank">civicrm.org</a> listed
extensions were hosted on <a moz-do-not-send="true"
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
moz-do-not-send="true" href="http://opensource.org"
target="_blank">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
moz-do-not-send="true" 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 moz-do-not-send="true"
href="http://opensource.org" target="_blank">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 moz-do-not-send="true"
href="http://opensource.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.html#howto"
target="_blank">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
moz-do-not-send="true"
href="http://spdx.org/licenses/GPL-3.0"
target="_blank">http://spdx.org/licenses/GPL-3.0</a>
and <a moz-do-not-send="true"
href="http://spdx.org/licenses/GPL-3.0+"
target="_blank">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 moz-do-not-send="true"
href="mailto:joe.murray@jmaconsulting.biz"
target="_blank">joe.murray@jmaconsulting.biz</a><br>
skype JosephPMurray twitter JoeMurray<br>
<a moz-do-not-send="true" href="tel:416.466.1281"
value="+14164661281" target="_blank">416.466.1281</a></div>
</div>
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</blockquote>
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-- <br>
<div><b>Simon Phipps</b> <font size="1"><a
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</blockquote>
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