[od-discuss] licenses.opendefinition.org related questions

Mon Jun 17 22:33:52 UTC 2013

On Mon, Jun 17, 2013 at 2:15 AM, Rufus Pollock <rufus.pollock at okfn.org> wrote:
> On 17 June 2013 02:01, Luis Villa <luis at tieguy.org> wrote:
>> On Tue, Jun 4, 2013 at 3:29 PM, Mike Linksvayer <ml at gondwanaland.com>
>> wrote:
>> > * It seems a pity to not use the same short identifiers as
>> > https://spdx.org/licenses/ ... and probably easier, to link to the
>> > spdx page for each license.
>>
>> The whole exercise seems somewhat duplicative of SPDX to me, at least
>> for software licenses. I would suggest that, unless there is evidence
>> of significant usage of the API, that the software licenses covered by
>> SPDX be removed from the coverage here.
>
> I'm very happy on this point - the only reason for including the OSI
> licenses was for API usage and easy of bulk download (these features were
> used in various OKF projects but I think the use of licenses part is reduced
> - if SPDX provided a simple API that would be great of course!)

It does, it's Linked Open Data: pages are annotated with RDFa,
vocabulary documented at https://spdx.org/rdf/terms ;-)

Note there's also https://licensedb.org and the recently announced
http://clipol.org

> So, unless anyone objects, we have an agreement to remove OSI licenses from
> the licenses repo and API.

I don't care one way or another.

It might be nice to consider what the overall aim of
licenses.opendefinition.org (ie the data/features there, to be merged
into opendefinition.org). My hunch would be to push it in direction of
supporting OD AC processes (eg as discussed on call, keeping copies of
license texts as they are discussed), delegating data dump/API
maintenance to other projects mentioned above.

Mike