IANA URN registration

[SoniEx2]

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This... is a somewhat strange request, but we believe the SPDX should register an URN namespace, such that we can officially put urn:SPDX-License-Identifier: in URI fields. We make this request because we uh, successfully misused someone's API, and it gave us this idea.

E.g. urn:spdx-license-identifier:0BSD AND LGPL-2.1-or-later

Original API misuse: https://github.com/modrinth/code/issues/2703

[seabass-labrax]

@SoniEx2, welcome and thanks for raising this issue :smiley:

I really like this idea! One thing that comes to mind is that there might be extra information that should be included (like which version of the License List it's referring to).

[kestewart]

@seabass-labrax - do we really need to include the license list version? The identifiers are either in the list or depricated, but at any rate they can be found.

[zvr]

Please note that SPDX already provides IRIs for all the resources it publishes. For example, you can use http://spdx.org/licenses/MIT to refer to a specific license.

I am not sure of the advantage of having a URN namespace for arbitrary user-generated license expressions.

[SoniEx2]

honestly, being able to refer to expressions as URNs kinda just makes SPDX expressions compatible with anything that accepts arbitrary URLs for licenses.

as for versioning it... well, urn:spdx-license-identifier:v2.2:... isn't too bad tbh.