Older GNU Licenses are not tagged on the FSF license page

[wking]

Older licenses like the GPL-1.0 and LGPL-2.0 are not covered by the FSF's license list or compat table. Presumably, the FSF considers them free, but deprecated in favor of their later versions (like the OSI's “Superseded licenses”). It would be nice to have FSF metadata for these older licenses, even if they are not current enough to deserve billing in the main list.

Previous discussion here and later.

[jonassmedegaard]

Those older licenses are indeed not listed at that specific page, but is listed at both https://www.gnu.org/licenses/licenses.html#LicenseURLs and https://www.gnu.org/licenses/old-licenses/old-licenses.html

[wking]

On Tue, Feb 27, 2018 at 02:19:39PM -0800, Jonas Smedegaard wrote:

Those older licenses are indeed not listed at that specific page, but is listed at both https://www.gnu.org/licenses/licenses.html#LicenseURLs and https://www.gnu.org/licenses/old-licenses/old-licenses.html

Right, but those pages don't tag them 1. For example, I expect the FSF considers the GPL-1.0 to be libre but not gpl-2-compatible, gpl-3-compatible, fdl-compatible, or viewpoint. But I don't want to make those tag calls without FSF wording to anchor them on, and I'd really like to have the FSF make those assignents using something machine readable like the HTML classes that 1 is translating.

[donaldr3]

What would we need to add on our license list page for these license:

GPL-1.0-only
GPL-1.0-or-later
OFL-1.0
LGPL-2.0-only
LGPL-2.0-or-later

For the OFL-1.0 in particular, the license is already mentioned in the entry for OFL-1.1 https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.en.html#SILOFL. Do we need to make separate entries for each one there? Thanks for any help you can provide.

[wking]

For the OFL-1.0 in particular, the license is already mentioned in the entry for OFL-1.1 https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.en.html#SILOFL...

Ah, I'd missed that. I've just floated #19 to address it.

For the other licenses, separate entries would be nice (because that's how I get the license text link), but it's not required. If you have many sections covering multiple licenses, I'll have to add logic to manually override those links when appropriate, but I'll need the FSF linking somewhere for it's view on the canonical text (I don't want to have to guess which text the FSF considers SILOFL-1.0 applies to).

Regardless of how you split the licenses among entries, it would be nice to have license-specific anchors to link to, because those anchors would survive the licenses being split into separate sections in the future. It's also nice to not have to come up with my own "what would the FSF choose" identifiers ;).