stark ( on November 7, 2007, 14:47:47 ) If you look at http://mloss.org/software/license/ you can see three entries that are more or less the same. One says "gpl", the other to say "gpl version 2" and "gpl version 2 or later". It would be nice for certain filters, especially the license filter, to be a pre-populated list and not free-form. The most popular ones can easily be added, more esoteric/not-so-OSS ones can be added later. I think sourcefourge and freshmeat have good lists. Even more interesting for the user would be what the impact of a specific license would be on their project. I am thinking of OSS licenses that are indeed OSS but not necessarily useful for commercial projects.

sonne ( on November 7, 2007, 15:31:50 ) I first thought that we should just only allow for the 61 OSI certified OSS licenses. However if we do that, then we exclude certain projects which all have their own custom license... so far it is easier to merge names.

stark ( on November 7, 2007, 19:39:25 ) The information "gpl" is just not enough. The project owner should name an explicit license name. Otherwise I would have to download the code to see what license it really has. I think not many people care about all of the 61 OSI licenses.

sonne ( on November 7, 2007, 22:01:58 ) What is the problem with the name "gpl"? To me it looks like a unique identifier... as would be gpl version 2, gpl version 1 and gpl version 2 or later...? About custom licenses, I could imagine people to have yet another bsd/mit alike license for their software. While I certainly don't like that idea I would also not want to exclude them from mloss.org. My hope would be that they write something like License: BSD alike

ong ( on November 8, 2007, 10:04:12 ) This is generally an issue between having drop down lists versus free form text. Maybe we should recommend in the FAQ something like the following, and hope that users use this form. Common OSI approved licenses are: Apache License 2.0 New BSD License GNU General Public License (GPL) GNU Library or "Lesser" General Public License (LGPL) MIT license Mozilla Public License 1.1 (MPL) Common Development and Distribution License Common Public License 1.0 Eclipse Public License The reason I say it is a general problem for free form text is because it is also a problem (e.g.) for author names (even though it is not apparent now). There will probably be entries "Bernhard Scholkopf", "Bernhard Schölkopf", "Bernhard Schoelkopf". That's assuming nobody does any typos.

stark ( on November 8, 2007, 14:43:24 ) sonne: "gpl" is unique as a string. It is ambiguous as a license declaration. For some things it's okay to have fuzzy declarations but not for legal stuff, if anybody cares.

stark ( on November 8, 2007, 15:06:01 ) On the other hand: like ong said, free form text leads to typos. It makes the whole thing more likely to become a huge mess with regard to searching. There must be a reason why freshmeat decided to have drop-down lists even for operating systems and programming languages. I do not really see a reason for not using drop-down lists whenever possible (license, programming language, platform). There is always the possibility to have an entry like "other" that allows for entering free form if necessary. In the long run this will make things easier I believe.

sonne ( on November 8, 2007, 22:14:37 ) You both convinced me that this is a good idea. Sounds also like it is easy to do.

sonne ( on November 11, 2007, 15:08:12 ) OK done.

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