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annotations: Use SPDX License Expressions for licenses
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Instead of comma-separated short identifiers, which have unclear
semantics (are the delimiters AND or OR?).  I don't see any discussion
of the syntax for this field in [1] (which landed it), but I'd floaded
license expressions before in the sub-thread starting at [2].  Greg
had pushed back against my earlier proposal (licensing information on
descriptors) with [3]:

> No, that's not going to work at all, you can't properly describe the
> license for a whole layer in any form of a string that could be
> standardized or parsed. SPDX is great for describing the individual
> licenses of things, but not for a collection of things, which almost
> always has an arbitrary license (example, what's the license, in a
> simple string, for a Ubuntu base layer?)

But SPDX License Expression are both more expressive and better
defined than the current comma delimiters.  Everything you could have
said with the comma-delimited string you can say more clearly with a
SPDX License Expression.  And because the syntax is not OCI-specific,
you're more likely to be able to find tooling that handles these
values out of the box.

[1]: opencontainers#636
[2]: opencontainers#501 (comment)
[3]: opencontainers#501 (comment)

Signed-off-by: W. Trevor King <wking@tremily.us>
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wking authored and jonboulle committed May 22, 2017
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4 changes: 3 additions & 1 deletion annotations.md
Original file line number Diff line number Diff line change
Expand Up @@ -27,7 +27,7 @@ This specification defines the following annotation keys, intended for but not l
* version MAY be [Semantic versioning-compatible](http://semver.org/)
* **org.opencontainers.image.revision** Source control revision identifier for the packaged software.
* **org.opencontainers.image.vendor** Name of the distributing entity, organization or individual.
* **org.opencontainers.image.licenses** Comma-separated list of licenses under which contained software is distributed, in [SPDX Short identifier](https://spdx.org/licenses/) form.
* **org.opencontainers.image.licenses** License(s) under which contained software is distributed as a [SPDX License Expression][spdx-license-expression].
* **org.opencontainers.image.ref.name** Name of the reference for a target (string). SHOULD only be considered valid when on descriptors on `index.json` within [image layout](image-layout.md).
* **org.opencontainers.image.title** Human-readable title of the image (string)
* **org.opencontainers.image.description** Human-readable description of the software packaged in the image (string)
Expand All @@ -54,3 +54,5 @@ While users are encouraged to use the **org.opencontainers.image** keys, tools M
| `ref.name` | | No equivalent in Label Schema |
| | `schema-version`| No equivalent in the OCI Image Spec |
| | `docker.*`, `rkt.*` | No equivalent in the OCI Image Spec |

[spdx-license-expression]: https://spdx.org/spdx-specification-21-web-version#h.jxpfx0ykyb60

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