james anderson wrote:
i don't know of the uses to which one puts license, but were it to matter, one could argue, that asdf should enforce canonicalized license keywords. i've no idea where to find such a thing, but there must be one "out there". this might require the addition of a "license-description" field (with a "" default).
I have an app which wanted to use the :license field but quickly realized I needed to maintain that info myself. Many projects don't set this field, and licensing is often an afterthought as a library grows. Then you have things like Qt which are dual-licensed.
At the end of the day, there are so many license variants that there probably isn't much point in standardizing this field. Anybody who cares will need to read the actual copyright statement anyway. But it wouldn't hurt to document a list of recommended license keys. Something like :commercial, :bsd, :mit, :gpl, :lgpl, :llgpl, :bsl, ...
- Daniel