license-compatibility icon indicating copy to clipboard operation
license-compatibility copied to clipboard

Sanity checking compatibility approach

Open andrew opened this issue 9 years ago • 2 comments

I've started this project based on some basic's that I've picked up from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/License_compatibility but I'm not that experienced with software licensing laws, would anyone with more experience like advise if this library is barking up the right tree?

andrew avatar Nov 25 '15 22:11 andrew

Hi, Just a few points regarding /lib/license/compatibility.rb You include 'EPL-1.0' and 'MPL-2.0' in the PERMISSIVE array, while they're generally considered as (weak) copyleft. Regarding copyleft, it's not uncommon to consider two dimensions, the scope (typically permissive/weak/strong copyleft) and the triggering action of obligations (distribution in most licences / network access, like in Affero licences). The licences in your STRONG_COPYLEFT would be more generally qualified as "network copyleft", while "strong copyleft" generally refers to licences like the GPL, CECILL-2.0. You seem to refer to SPDX 1, using licence IDs with "+". Starting with SPDX 2, "+" is considered as an operator in an expression (cf. http://spdx.org/sites/spdx/files/SPDX-2.0.pdf ). I don't know if this is relevant for your approach, but it might (Npm has switched to SPDX 2.0.) HTH

camillem avatar Nov 29 '15 10:11 camillem

Thanks for the feedback @camillem, I've made a few tweaks based on your suggestions:

  • MPL and EPL are now weak copyleft: https://github.com/librariesio/license-compatibility/commit/733ed2c72c1538007856a878c303e908443d3aef
  • Rename copyleft to strong copyleft and strong copyleft to network copyleft https://github.com/librariesio/license-compatibility/commit/b1686769df9a0cd4e5660bde54da984bb3d59f7d
  • move towards SPDX 2 by ignoring + for now: https://github.com/librariesio/license-compatibility/commit/cc94c79b2532055f65fc06181028cc0777df0415

andrew avatar Dec 03 '15 20:12 andrew