Hi David,
Good question. I don't recall discussing the case sensitivity of the license identifiers. The SPDX Tools currently treat these as case sensitive - but that could be considered a bug. I did a search of the spec itself and did not find any documentation on the case sensitivity of the license ID's. I personally don't have a strong opinion on case sensitivity - I can easily fix the tools if we decide license ID's are case insensitive. Gary From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Wheeler, David A Sent: Friday, November 13, 2015 8:00 AM To: [email protected] Cc: Ben Balter Subject: Are SPDX license identifiers case-sensitive? Are SPDX license identifiers case-sensitive? License *expressions* are not case-sensitive (e.g., the AND, OR, and WITH), per here: http://wiki.spdx.org/view/LicenseExpressionFAQ#Is_the_License_Expression_Syn tax_Case_Sensitive.3F But that doesn't tell me about license *identifiers*. I've been presuming that they are case-sensitive, because: * "GPL-2.0" and "Apache-2.0" are both license identifiers, and clearly upper & lower case are used. Usually case-insensitive info sticks to one case. * The license identifiers *do* retain their case where in the URLs distributed by OSI: http://opensource.org/licenses * The spec https://spdx.org/SPDX-specifications/spdx-version-2.0 section 1.6.8: says "Tags and RDF properties are case sensitive". But that's not a slam-dunk; clearly tags could be case-sensitive, while license IDs not case-sensitive. I ask because the "licensee" Ruby gem analyzes a license file to quickly determine a license: https://github.com/benbalter/licensee I intend to use it, however, it returns a *lowercase-only* value for the license name, which isn't what the spec uses. I'd like to provide exactly what the spec says, but if it doesn't matter, maybe I shouldn't worry. I raised a question about it here: https://github.com/benbalter/licensee/issues/72 Thanks. --- David A. Wheeler
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