My personal preference would be that the license identifiers be *matched* by forcing everything to lower case, AND that SPDX encourage *displays* of a license identifier to use the exact mixed-case as shown in the SPDX lists. The mixed-case forms use normal English conventions (all-caps for acronyms, initial caps for proper names), and it’s NICE to have a display that uses standard conventions. However, requiring exact-case matching is a recipe for subtle mistakes; the actual matching should be case-insensitive, just like license expressions which use them are.
I note that the OSI website accepts both the exact-case and the all-lower-case versions of the SPDX license IDs. That’s why I say “to lower case” instead of “match ignoring case” – in the case of URLs, you have to know EXACTLY what to transform it to before you can get matching ignoring case. (I realize that in Greek there are 2 lower case s’s, but there are no license id’s with Greek letters and there IS a way to deal with that anyway, so that’s not relevant.) The “licensee” gem could reply with a new “SPDX” field that returned the mixed-case string value, while doing lookups on all lower case. --- David A. Wheeler
_______________________________________________ Spdx-tech mailing list [email protected] https://lists.spdx.org/mailman/listinfo/spdx-tech
