Die 5. 02. 19 et hora 15:10 Carmen Bianca Bakker scripsit:
- MIT and BSD are tricky licences. They include the copyright
holder within the licence---which means that no two such licences are identical---and mandate an exact reproduction of the licence. REUSE currently deals with this by recommending the developer to create a separate licence for every copyright holder, but this is frankly very ugly.
- Solve this by not making any recommendations about this in
the spec. Instead, include an explanation of the problem in an FAQ.
I would suggest that we stick to the SPDX templates and that if SPDX would recongise the text as vanilla MIT or BSD, so should we.
As you can see from the MIT and BSD-4-Clause (the most wordy one) examples linked below, everything that is in red is variable text and SPDX would treat different strings there as still conformant with the template:
https://spdx.org/licenses/MIT.html https://spdx.org/licenses/BSD-4-Clause.html
See the <alt> and <optional> tags in the XML sources of the SPDX license templates here:
https://github.com/spdx/license-list-XML/blob/master/src/BSD-4-Clause.xml https://github.com/spdx/license-list-XML/blob/master/src/MIT.xml
One idea how we could tackle this (and it would be wonderful to sync up with SPDX for this!), would be to:
• store the SPDX template text in plain-text form¹ in `LICENSES/ MIT.txt`
• include the following in the headers:
file_a.txt: ``` © 2010 Some Hacker some1@hack.me SPDX-License-Identifier: MIT ```
file_b.txt: ``` © 2015 Corporation X x@example.com SPDX-License-Identifier: MIT ```
• this would mean all the needed info is there. If you look at the license text (or rather its SPDX template), you don’t need anything else but insert the copyright year(s) and holder in the license template. The other parts are optional to be changed – e.g. “copyright holder” is prefectly enough and does not *need* changing, it is just that several companies/projects chose to do so.
• in turn, a BoM tool would then gather the copyright and license info anyway, so all’s well.
cheers, Matija — 1 https://github.com/spdx/license-list-data/blob/master/text/ MIT.txt