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Bug 514272

Summary:	Use SPDX to capture license information in IPZilla
Product:	Community	Reporter:	Wayne Beaton <wayne.beaton>
Component:	IPZilla	Assignee:	Eclipse Foundation IPZilla inbox <foundation.ipzilla-inbox>
Status:	RESOLVED FIXED	QA Contact:
Severity:	normal
Priority:	P3	CC:	mike.milinkovich, sharon.corbett
Version:	unspecified
Target Milestone:	2017-Q2
Hardware:	PC
OS:	Linux
Whiteboard:

Description Wayne Beaton

2017-03-27 13:28:13 EDT

We should start using SPDX codes and expression syntax for capturing licenses in IPZilla.

Searching for uses of a specific license is currently a bit cumbersome. With licenses entered in plain text, it is sometimes difficult to search when multiple licenses are listed (e.g. including "Apache License, version 2.0" in a comma-separated list makes using regular expressions challenging).

There is also some inconsistency in the manner in which licenses are captured (though this is generally historical). e.g. "Academic Free License OR BSD (Dual - we choose BSD), BSD alone, MIT, Unicode, Apache 2.0"

Using SPDX codes will make searching for the use of any single license much easier. Further, it will make automated searches more consistent.

For cases where multiple licenses are involved, we should consider adopting SPDX License Expressions [2], e.g. "(LGPL-2.1 AND MIT AND BSD-2-Clause)" or "(LGPL-2.1 OR MIT OR BSD-3-Clause)" specify conjunctive and disjunctive combinations of licenses.

[1] https://spdx.org/licenses/
[2] https://spdx.org/spdx-specification-21-web-version#h.jxpfx0ykyb60

Comment 1 Mike Milinkovich

2017-03-28 15:17:41 EDT

Perhaps a separate bug, but should we consider replacing or augmenting about.html files with SPDX license files?

Comment 2 Wayne Beaton

2017-03-28 16:52:44 EDT

(In reply to Mike Milinkovich from comment #1)
> Perhaps a separate bug, but should we consider replacing or augmenting
> about.html files with SPDX license files?

I think that's the next step for Bug 507786.

Comment 3 Wayne Beaton

2017-07-27 15:08:52 EDT

The Eclipse IP Team has started using SPDX license codes and expression syntax to capture licenses for new content.

Do we want to go through the effort of updating existing content? We may be able to automate at least some part of it...

Comment 4 Mike Milinkovich

2017-07-31 10:54:17 EDT

(In reply to Wayne Beaton from comment #3)
> Do we want to go through the effort of updating existing content? We may be
> able to automate at least some part of it...

Ideally yes, but it is not a high priority. I think that having consistent license identifiers would make our IPzilla records more useful.

Comment 5 Wayne Beaton

2018-05-15 15:46:44 EDT

The IP Team has been using SPDX codes for some time. At some point in the future, we may opt to update existing CQs, but I'm going to declare that out of scope here and declare victory.