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Factlink / pavlov

Provides a Command/Query/Interactor framework.
MIT License
22 stars 4 forks source link

License missing from gemspec #41

Closed bf4 closed 10 years ago

bf4 commented 10 years ago

RubyGems.org doesn't report a license for your gem. This is because it is not specified in the gemspec of your last release.

via e.g.

spec.license = 'MIT'
# or
spec.licenses = ['MIT', 'GPL-2']

Including a license in your gemspec is an easy way for rubygems.org and other tools to check how your gem is licensed. As you can image, scanning your repository for a LICENSE file or parsing the README, and then attempting to identify the license or licenses is much more difficult and more error prone. So, even for projects that already specify a license, including a license in your gemspec is a good practice. See, for example, how rubygems.org uses the gemspec to display the rails gem license.

There is even a License Finder gem to help companies/individuals ensure all gems they use meet their licensing needs. This tool depends on license information being available in the gemspec. This is an important enough issue that even Bundler now generates gems with a default 'MIT' license.

I hope you'll consider specifying a license in your gemspec. If not, please just close the issue with a nice message. In either case, I'll follow up. Thanks for your time!

Appendix:

If you need help choosing a license (sorry, I haven't checked your readme or looked for a license file), GitHub has created a license picker tool. Code without a license specified defaults to 'All rights reserved'-- denying others all rights to use of the code. Here's a list of the license names I've found and their frequencies

p.s. In case you're wondering how I found you and why I made this issue, it's because I'm collecting stats on gems (I was originally looking for download data) and decided to collect license metadata,too, and make issues for gemspecs not specifying a license as a public service :). See the previous link or my blog post aobut this project for more information.

markijbema commented 10 years ago

Thanks very much for pointing is at this oversight! I will fix this tomorrow. What do you think is better, create a new version with the license, or overwrite the current version (I cannot really oversee the negative effects of the latter, but it feels 'wrong')

bf4 commented 10 years ago

I'm not sure I understand your question.

Now, you could update the gemspec without updating the gem version, and anyone doing an install from master would have the license in that.

Most people just add a license line to the gemspec and have it go out with their next release, or release a patch-level release (x.x.++)

markijbema commented 10 years ago

Ah, thanks. I was under the misunderstanding that you could overwrite versions. Thanks for clarifying! I will update it asap.

bf4 commented 10 years ago

Ok, glad I guess right :smile:

bf4 commented 10 years ago

Great, thanks!