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.mur...@jmaconsulting.biz <mailto:joe.mur...@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.mur...@jmaconsulting.biz <mailto:joe.mur...@jmaconsulting.biz>
skype JosephPMurray twitter JoeMurray
416.466.1281 <tel:416.466.1281>
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