From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: Luca Ceresoli Date: Fri, 15 Jan 2016 18:53:45 +0100 Subject: [Buildroot] Standardizing format for specifying license(s) In-Reply-To: <20160115145153.39e486e3@free-electrons.com> References: <5698DDBE.3000402@imgtec.com> <1a9e07dbd834ef9ca57e1b6a91d043c2@localhost> <20160115145153.39e486e3@free-electrons.com> Message-ID: <56993229.5060606@lucaceresoli.net> List-Id: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit To: buildroot@busybox.net Hi, Thomas Petazzoni wrote: > 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? Changing our format to comply with SPDX would be a good idea IMHO. If there's a well-defined and suitable standard out there it makes no sense to define another one. Obviously I understand this might be annoying to somebody. But we never formally specified how "composite" licenses must be written and so, strictly speaking, any parsing activity not based on a reliable ground. -- Luca