On 29 October 2017 at 16:05, Clemens Lang <[email protected]> wrote: > ## Convincing Large Companies to Use Open Source > Largely a discussion on which licenses are company-friendly and which > ones are not. Mentioned some of the problems companies face and where > open source could help, such as making license compliance easy by > providing machine-readable license specifications (e.g. using SPDX). > > From a MacPorts point of view, we should probably consider adapting the > standardized identifiers from the SPDX license list > (https://spdx.org/licenses/) for our license field. Unfortunately that > would be some additional effort for licenses we did not distinguish so > far, such as the various BSD-style licenses.
>From an OSS PoV: FreeBSD does this (standardizing on SPDX identifiers). The gain has been limited though I believe not burdensome. One does need to be careful about licensing identifiers where code is of mixed origin, multi-licensed, or otherwise confusing. It is important that the scope of licensing be clear from the get-go. >From a Large Company OSS Representative PoV: Having these sorts of indicators are a great *start* for a license compliance program. In practice most of the concern with software is in the distribution and less-so in the usage area. This is particularly true for projects like macports which are primarily used by internal users for local reasons. -- Eitan Adler
