Snap package licenses

[Neal Gompa]

No, you're not missing something. AppStream doesn't really have a
great way to represent custom licenses. But license expressions are
supported, as you can see in this example[1]. I suspect the "proper"
way to handle it would be to have the license bundled in the metadata
when "Custom" or "Proprietary" is used, so that the resource is
available for review prior to installing. With the standardized
licenses, usually the software centers render hyperlinks that users
can click to see the terms.

I'd potentially argue that BSD and MIT licenses would probably need to
be handled the same way, given that copyright owners are declared in
the license text.

[1]: https://gitlab.com/osslugaru/lugaru/blob/master/Dist/Linux/lugaru.appdata.xml

On Tue, Jan 31, 2017 at 2:03 PM, Gustavo Niemeyer <gustavo at niemeyer.net> wrote:
>
> Using the license ids from SPDX seems straightforward, and that's what
> AppStream seems to encourage. But it doesn't mention support for SPDX
> license expressions (has a custom and/or rule), or what to do on custom
> licenses. So the harmony seems shallow, if you see what I mean. Or am I
> missing something?
>
> On Tue, Jan 31, 2017 at 4:24 PM, Neal Gompa <ngompa13 at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> SUSE has their own list of non-standard references[1], but my
>> understanding is that SPDX is working on making this a bit more
>> flexible in this regard. This was one of the reasons we haven't
>> switched to it in Fedora (the other being the mismatch of BSD/MIT tags
>> to SPDX equivalents). AppStream metainfo files shipped with software
>> include the SPDX license tags[2].
>>
>> One of the reasons I personally favor the Fedora tags more is because
>> it's not obnoxious with dealing with classes of licenses. However,
>> AppStream does mandate SPDX, and harmonizing snap metadata with
>> AppStream metadata makes it easier to keep things sane and in sync,
>> especially if developers want to use their metainfo files as input for
>> generating parts of the snap metadata. Of course, maintaining harmony
>> does not imply that SPDX license tags need to be used in snap data,
>> only that some kind of automatic mapping from SPDX to another system
>> is available. Richard Hughes' appstream-glib (used by GNOME/Ubuntu
>> Software) has such a mechanism for going from Fedora/SUSE-classic to
>> SPDX[3], and the other way around is considerably simpler.
>>
>> [1]: https://github.com/openSUSE/obs-service-format_spec_file
>> [2]:
>> https://www.freedesktop.org/software/appstream/docs/chap-Quickstart.html
>> [3]:
>> https://github.com/hughsie/appstream-glib/blob/master/libappstream-glib/as-utils.c#L555
>>
>> On Tue, Jan 31, 2017 at 11:43 AM, Gustavo Niemeyer
>> <gustavo.niemeyer at canonical.com> wrote:
>> > That's an interesting idea.  Is there a known repository for license
>> > texts
>> > which are not standard?  I see SPDX uses a LicenseRef-<ID> kind of
>> > reference, but it's not clear what that is referencing. Just another
>> > field
>> > inside the XML in the case of AppStream, I suppose?
>> >
>> > On Thu, Jan 26, 2017 at 9:58 PM, Neal Gompa <ngompa13 at gmail.com> wrote:
>> >>
>> >> On Thu, Jan 26, 2017 at 5:35 PM, Mark Shuttleworth <mark at ubuntu.com>
>> >> wrote:
>> >> >
>> >> > We should allow a plaintext field there for this situation. Yes, go
>> >> > ahead with "Other open source".
>> >> >
>> >>
>> >> It would probably make sense to support SPDX license tags and
>> >> expressions[1]. This is used in AppStream, so a great amount of
>> >> software is already classified in this manner. Furthermore, openSUSE
>> >> uses SPDX tags for their license metadata for packages, and Debian
>> >> uses a subset of it as part of the copyright file structure in Debian
>> >> Source Control packaging.
>> >>
>> >> While we in Fedora use our own license tag list[2] that predates SPDX
>> >> (used by a great deal of Linux distributions), we maintain a mapping
>> >> to SPDX for AppStream support.
>> >>
>> >> Having verifiable license information (either Fedora style or SPDX
>> >> style) is also useful for ensuring things are "compatible" or
>> >> "desired" on a system, depending on whatever preference you may have.
>> >>
>> >> [1]: https://spdx.org/licenses/
>> >> [2]:
>> >> https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Licensing:Main#Software_License_List
>> >>
>> >> --
>> >> 真実はいつも一つ！/ Always, there's only one truth!
>> >>
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>> >
>> >
>> >
>> > --
>> > gustavo @ http://niemeyer.net
>> >
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>>
>>
>>
>> --
>> 真実はいつも一つ！/ Always, there's only one truth!
>>
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>
>
>
>
> --
>
> gustavo @ http://niemeyer.net
>
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-- 
真実はいつも一つ！/ Always, there's only one truth!