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digitalbazaar / rdf-canonize

An implementation of the RDF Dataset Normalization Algorithm in JavaScript.
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lacks license grant (contains license but no information of what that might cover) #13

Open jonassmedegaard opened 5 years ago

jonassmedegaard commented 5 years ago

Please include a statement from the copyright holders of what licensing terms they grant for which of the creative works that they own copyright for.

The project ships with a general license, and the package.json contains a license hint. But nowhere is documented who grants said licensing terms to what exactly. On the contrary, some files contain the statement "All rights reserved" which is conventional non-copyleft licensing - i.e. the default when nothing else is stated (and stating that explicitly is superfluous since 30 years!)

Please consider adding an explicit license grant - at minimum similar to jsonld project, but preferably at the top of each copyright-protected file next to (or instead of) that superfluous "All rights reserved" statement which it negates.

davidlehn commented 5 years ago

I'm a bit confused about you are asking for here. There is a LICENSE file and I think all the significant files have a Copyright comment. Is that not enough? What are you recommending?

jonassmedegaard commented 5 years ago

Essentially I ask/recommend that whenever you feel the need to state copyright you also feel the pleasure to license.

Or put differently: I am talking about the point "Put a license notice in each file" at https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-howto.html - which I believe is a fine document regardless of your passion or not for that particular organisation and that particular license.

jonassmedegaard commented 5 years ago

A "license grant" a.k.a. a "license notice" is different from a "license" a.k.a. "license file".

davidlehn commented 5 years ago

I'm still unsure what action to take here. Are you suggesting adding license info to each file? That's kind of a pain to do. If it's something else could you be more explicit on what the suggested change is? This code came from jsonld.js originally so both projects are doing similar things with license notification.

jonassmedegaard commented 5 years ago

Quoting David I. Lehn (2019-01-15 03:59:19)

I'm still unsure what action to take here. Are you suggesting adding license info to each file? That's kind of a pain to do. If it's something else could you be more explicit on what the suggested change is? This code came from jsonld.js originally so both projects are doing similar things with license notification.

Yes, I suggest to state in each source file who claims to own the rights and what licensing they(!) grant.

James Bon don't simply have "license to kill" - he is licensed by the british government to kill. Other governments might very well disagree with that grant.

Knowing a license but not who granted it has no value legally.

Socially it has value - similar to "Written with passion!" :-)

I suggest that you strengthen the legal value of sharing your project, by stating it explicitly as license grants by holders of copyright (not implicitly by including some license file with the project, leaving it to guesswork who put that file there, and whether it applies to all or only a certain subset of distributed material).

...and I recommend that you do that embedded in data (i.e. source files) not only metadata (packaging hints).

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jonassmedegaard commented 5 years ago

Quoting David I. Lehn (2019-01-15 03:59:19)

This code came from jsonld.js originally so both projects are doing similar things with license notification.

For code that you don't hold copyright, best is to request upstream to do the same: Explicitly state copyright and ownership embedded in data itself.

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