Where does list of licenses come from?

[purpleidea]

Hi,

I was playing with this code and to give one example, I found this license: https://github.com/google/licenseclassifier/blob/main/licenses/Facebook-2-Clause.txt
It says in your source code (

licenseclassifier/license_type.go

Line 26 in 148b633

// The names come from the https://spdx.org/licenses website, and are

) that:

The names come from the https://spdx.org/licenses website, and are also the filenames of the licenses in licenseclassifier/licenses.

I can't actually find this and certain other licenses on the SPDX website. Could you elaborate how you both maintain the list and how you found this on the SPDX site?

I think it's great that you have more licenses in here, but I just want to make sure there isn't a collision since the returned identifiers are meant to be unique. If these aren't actually in SPDX, are you willing to rename them or accept a patch to do so which adds the SPDX LicenseRef- prefixes? (These prefixes are there to specify non-SPDX licenses.)

Thanks!

[wcn3]

The license database has just accumulated organically based on the types of license we've encountered. The comment is definitely not accurate now, as you note, since not all licenses appear in SPDX.

In principle, I'm not opposed to renaming the licenses to incorporate the LicenseRef prefix, since it's better aligned with this standard. However, in practice, it would cause problems with version compatibility guarantees and impact current users of the code.

In v2, the user is responsible for supplying the license corpus, so they can provide the mapping of names however they see fit, so this isn't an issue in the new system.