The developer in me questions, putting history aside for a moment, the value of case sensitivity. Is there a use case where it would be preferred for `mit` to be different from `MIT` or for `Apache` to be different from `apache`?
On the other hand, case insensitivity makes things easier in practicality (even if ultimately less pure) when you think through use cases like handling user input in a form, having a license name in a URL (which is generally downcased), or storing licenses in version control or on a file system, which may differ in their case sensitivity support (the use case in question). On Fri, Nov 13, 2015 at 3:16 PM Gary O'Neall <[email protected]> wrote: > 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_Syntax_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 > > >
_______________________________________________ Spdx-tech mailing list [email protected] https://lists.spdx.org/mailman/listinfo/spdx-tech
