Hi Hen, There is no recommendation by SPDX.org yet on whether to use SPDX short license identifiers within a file. There has been a fair amount of discussion with some concerns identified when *only* short identifiers are included in file headers. This is still an active discussion for which I anticipate a recommendation for a best practice will be made sometime in 2015.
As one of the largest producers of SPDX files, Wind River has come to the conclusion (for now) the best general practice is to use a standard license file notice if one exists. In the case of the Apache 2.0 license, that would be to include the following license notice in every file (as recommend by the appendix of the Apache 2.0 license): Copyright [yyyy] [name of copyright owner] Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the "License"); you may not use this file except in compliance with the License. You may obtain a copy of the License at http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0 Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software distributed under the License is distributed on an "AS IS" BASIS, WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied. See the License for the specific language governing permissions and limitations under the License. This is easy to identify by many SPDX generation tools today. This is also a best practice followed by the Apache Foundation (along with including a full copy of the Apache 2.0 in LICENSE.txt). It is my opinion that the Apache Foundation approach for managing license information in source code represents the current gold standard. An approach where a clear simple license notice appears at the top of every source file, eliminating license ambiguity that is commonly found in many other easily accessible source code repositories. - Mark Mark Gisi | Wind River | Director, IP & Open Source Tel (510) 749-2016 | Fax (510) 749-4552 From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Henri Yandell Sent: Saturday, June 06, 2015 10:09 AM To: [email protected] Subject: SPDX Identifier in licenses/source headers What would be the correct tag to put in a license and license source header to make life easier for SPDX? I see 'SPDX-License-Identifier' referenced in 2013 emails, but searching the spec doesn't find that. As an example, If I've an Apache 2.0 license, should I be inserting 'SPDX-License-Identifier: Apache 2.0' into the LICENSE.txt and each source header? If that's the case, is there any best practice location to put it in? Thanks, Hen
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