From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: Thomas Petazzoni Date: Fri, 15 Jan 2016 14:51:53 +0100 Subject: [Buildroot] Standardizing format for specifying license(s) In-Reply-To: <1a9e07dbd834ef9ca57e1b6a91d043c2@localhost> References: <5698DDBE.3000402@imgtec.com> <1a9e07dbd834ef9ca57e1b6a91d043c2@localhost> Message-ID: <20160115145153.39e486e3@free-electrons.com> List-Id: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit To: buildroot@busybox.net Alexander, On Fri, 15 Jan 2016 14:12:47 +0100, Alexander Dahl wrote: > If not already done, I would suggest to have those license stuff > compatible with SPDX [1]. I noticed license names in at least some > packages are not the same as the identifiers on > https://spdx.org/licenses/ ? so if someone wants to generate SPDX stuff > from a buildroot project, it maybe would be better to have a format for > names and delimiters which make it easier towards SPDX package data. We normally try to use the SPDX license code, at least for "new" licenses (i.e licenses for which we don't yet have a single Buildroot package under that license). However, for the first licenses (like GPL, LGPL, etc.), we have started using an encoding that is not the one from SPDX. I would personally be in favor to move to SPDX license codes everywhere, but that would break things for people that are currently parsing our license information. Is this reasonable to do nonetheless? The Buildroot documentation already has a license of license abbreviations: https://buildroot.org/downloads/manual/manual.html#legal-info-list-licenses. Note that http://spdx.org/sites/spdx/files/SPDX-2.0.pdf, page 82 and 83, has a description of a syntax for composite license expressions. One case that SPDX doesn't allow to encode is "GPL" or "LGPL", i.e the cases where the software is said to be licensed under the GPL or LGPL, but without any version information. Yes this sucks because in practice it means you don't know the corresponding license text. But sometimes, this is the only information provided by the package source code. Examples: MII_DIAG_LICENSE = GPL # No version specified tslib/tslib.mk:TSLIB_LICENSE = GPL, LGPL Best regards, Thomas -- Thomas Petazzoni, CTO, Free Electrons Embedded Linux, Kernel and Android engineering http://free-electrons.com