foss-flame 0.1.7

FOSS License Additional Metadata

FOSS Licenses

A database with meta data for FOSS licenses adding useful information to existing licenses aiming at simplifying compliance work. The meta data consists of:

• compatibility as (another license)

• other names (aliases)

• license text

Background

There are lots of software licenses out there (e.g. see ScanCode LicenseDB), some of them are FOSS and some not. In this project we primarily focus on FOSS licenses.

License name proliferation

When you're working with compliance you are used to liceses called differently in source code or by tools (e.g. GPLv2, GPL (v2) and GNU General Public License Version 2) when all you really want too see is the SPDX identifier GPL-2.0-only. A seasoned compliance engineer or lawyer knows this already, but we need this information machine readable.

License proliferation

Another problem you face when working with compliance is the need to check whether the licenses in a combined work are compatible. One example is the X11-Style (Keith Packard) license, which really is the same license as the Historical Permission Notice and Disclaimer - sell variant. X11-Style (Keith Packard) is not supported in for example the OSADL matrix, but HPND-sell-variant is. Again, a seasoned license engineer or lawyer knows which licenses are compatible and not, but we need to make it possible for a machine to assist us.

About

This projet aims at providing a database with:

• "all" different names for a license in a database

• mappings from one license to another license which is supported by the OSADL matrix

and, to make the database easier to use:

• a Python API

• command line tool

Database

The data can be found in the var directory. Each license has a JSON file with meta information and a LICENSE file with the license text.

Tools and APIs

• flame - command line program

• Python API

Contributions

You are more than welcome to contribute:

• create an issue

• create PR

We do not have a CLA or similar, but we assume your contributions are made under our license (for the code and data).

Related tools and projects

• flict - FOSS License Compatibility Tool

• License Compatibility Matrix - a matrix with license compatibilities

• scancode - ScanCode toolkit

• ScanCode LicenseDB - a database with licenses

Acknowledgements

• Nexb for their general and generous work in FOSS compliance, especially scancode and ScanCode LicenseDB.

• Max Huber for LDBcollector

• OSADL for their License Compatibility Matrix

Technical notes

Finding and replacing

To search for needles, in our case license expressions, (e.g. "BSD 0-Clause") to replace (with e.g. "0BSD") we use the following strategy:

• list all needles in order of length, longest first

• for each needle find and replace

This is a naive approach but given the limited data at hand it should work.