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Consistent licensing across NSLS-II and Bluesky projects #89

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MikeHart85 opened this issue Feb 25, 2020 · 3 comments
Open
2 of 3 tasks

Consistent licensing across NSLS-II and Bluesky projects #89

MikeHart85 opened this issue Feb 25, 2020 · 3 comments
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@MikeHart85
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MikeHart85 commented Feb 25, 2020

@danielballan and I noticed that GitHub doesn't recognize or label most Bluesky projects as having a BSD 3-Clause license, even though they ship with what we consider a BSD 3-Clause license.

This means they don't get a prominent license tag that identifies the license at the top of the project landing page:

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And they also don't get a header providing a quick overview of license features when you view the license file:

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Note that this project is correctly recognized. Ophyd, for example, is not.

The reason for this are differences in the LICENSE file, deviating from what GitHub recognizes as a standard BSD 3-Clause license. We think this is worth fixing, as there is both legal and social value in using an established and recognizable license with minimal deviations.

Reference for what GitHub recognizes as standard: BSD 3-Clause

The current LICENSE in this repo matches this exactly, changing only the [year] and replacing [fullname] with "Brookhaven National Laboratory".

The current LICENSE in many other NSLS-II and Bluesky repos has the following differences:

  1. Missing explicit BSD 3-Clause License declaration on line 1
  2. Names Brookhaven Science Associates as copyright holder in addition to Brookhaven National Laboratory
  3. Has All rights reserved. on same line as copyright, instead of its own line below it
  4. Uses bullet points instead of numbered list of clauses
  5. Modified Clause 3 to again explicitly name Brookhaven Science Associates, Brookhaven National Laboratory as copyright holder, replacing the default reference: the copyright holder

Points 1, 3 and 4 should be straightforward fixes.

Points 2 and 5 require attention.

Once we have answers to the above, the next steps would be:

  • Update LICENSE in this repo to comply with requirements
  • Ensure updated LICENSE is still recognized by GitHub, fix if not
  • Update LICENSEs in other repos to match this one
@MikeHart85 MikeHart85 self-assigned this Feb 25, 2020
@MikeHart85
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Questions for @stuartcampbell:

  1. Should the copyright line name Brookhaven National Laboratory, or Brookhaven Science Associates, or either, or both?
  2. Is modifying Clause 3 really necessary? Or is the default reference to the copyright holder sufficient?

Leaving Clause 3 unmodified would be ideal, since that is compliant with the standard license format, already references the copyright holder, and is the biggest factor in GitHub "disqualifying" the current LICENSE files.

@stuartcampbell
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It should be Brookhaven National Laboratory
Otherwise it should be the normal unmodified license. The modified licenses are from the era before all my meetings with BNL legal. We should change all the non-standard to BSD 3-Clause

I did PRs into a lot of our projects that had no license at all to add the standard license.

@cryos
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cryos commented Jul 31, 2020

It looks like the license in the cookie cutter has been updated, so the first item is done, I also made a new respository and can confirm the second item. I guess it is just the final item updating licenses in existing repositories that needs attention now.

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