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

Tue Jan 7 15:45:21 UTC 2014

Could this be a working group?

On 12/19/2013 10:03 AM, Simon Phipps 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 <mailto: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 <http://opensource.org> - 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/ 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
>     <http://civicrm.org/> and provide auto-download services for via
>     civicrm.org <http://civicrm.org/> 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/.
>     While early on most civicrm.org <http://civicrm.org/> listed
>     extensions were hosted on drupal.org <http://drupal.org/> 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
>     <http://opensource.org> from one type of node to another, then
>     doing a bit of cleanup to support some requirements for automated
>     use. Looking at opensource.org <http://opensource.org/>, 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
>     <http://opensource.org> 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, and the
>     differences between the 'How to Apply These Terms to Your New
>     Programs' sections of http://spdx.org/licenses/GPL-3.0 and
>     http://spdx.org/licenses/GPL-3.0+). 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 <mailto:joe.murray at jmaconsulting.biz>
>     skype JosephPMurray twitter JoeMurray
>     416.466.1281 <tel:416.466.1281>
>
>     _______________________________________________
>     Infrastructure mailing list
>     Infrastructure at opensource.org <mailto:Infrastructure at opensource.org>
>     http://projects.opensource.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/infrastructure
>
>
>
>
> -- 
> *Simon Phipps* http://webmink.com <http://webmink.com/>
> /*Meshed Insights Ltd* /
> /Office:/ +1 (415) 683-7660 /or/ +44 (238) 098 7027
> /Mobile/:  +44 774 776 2816/
> /
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Infrastructure mailing list
> Infrastructure at opensource.org
> http://projects.opensource.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/infrastructure

-- 
     ||    |      |  ||||    ||    ||    |  ||||    |||    | |||
Patrick Masson
General Manager, Director & Secretary to the Board
Open Source Initiative
855 El Camino Real, Ste 13A, #270
Palo Alto, CA 94301
United States
Skype: massonpj
sip: OSI-Masson at ekiga.net
Ph: (970) 4MASSON
Em: massson at opensource.org <mailto:masson at opensource.org>
Ws: www.opensource.org <http://www.opensource.org>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.opensource.org/pipermail/license-discuss_lists.opensource.org/attachments/20140107/93289c01/attachment.html>