Wish List (generally ignored ;-), Brainstorming
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yegorich
Posts: 7
Joined: 01 Mar 2016, 17:53

Extended Licensing Information

Post by yegorich » 29 May 2019, 14:47

usb_modeswitch provides some code under different licenses: jim - Apache 2.0, BSD-2-Clause etc.

It would be very helpful for a FOSS compliance process to have this information in one file providing all related license texts and to what code parts they apply. Also a file providing a list of all copyright holders would greatly simplify the attribution retrieval.

Thanks.

Regards,
Yegor

Josh
Site Admin
Posts: 6570
Joined: 03 Nov 2007, 00:30

Re: Extended Licensing Information

Post by Josh » 31 May 2019, 20:49

O.K., I have no objections regarding this suggestion.

Do you happen to have a positive example at hand? Maybe a link to one?

Thanks!

yegorich
Posts: 7
Joined: 01 Mar 2016, 17:53

Re: Extended Licensing Information

Post by yegorich » 05 Jun 2019, 08:59

I'm quite new to the FOSS compliance area. First of all take a look at the source tree of https://github.com/fossology/fossology. I use this software to scan OSS projects I use for licenses and copyright notices. LICENSE provides license texts and NOTICES provides both license texts and copyright notices.

This paper gives a FOSS compliance overview and can be used as a starting point: https://www.linuxfoundation.org/publica ... -projects/.

https://spdx.org/ is also a very useful resource. A lot of projects like Linux, barebox etc. already use SPDX identifiers that makes the automatic license information retrieval much easier.

Thanks.

ladis
Posts: 5
Joined: 07 Aug 2018, 16:32

Re: Extended Licensing Information

Post by ladis » 21 Aug 2019, 08:03

Josh, perhaps removing jim source would be an option as discussed couple of years ago. With limited human resources having small codebase always helps. Then only dispatcher.c file is left there with BSD license. Also having source code repository somewhere would help. Even FTP with tarballs and patches would give an idea what is happening.

yegorich
Posts: 7
Joined: 01 Mar 2016, 17:53

Re: Extended Licensing Information

Post by yegorich » 21 Aug 2019, 12:07

As for the FOSS compliance, there is now a helpful utility REUSE (https://reuse.software/tutorial/).

I'm also for moving the code into a git repo. Perhaps even adding TravisCI compile checks.

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