Ngi0 reuse

[Jit-p]

Hello,

By way of introduction, I am Jithendra with the Free Software Foundation Europe, a consortium member of the NGI0 Initiative, of which you have signed data-interoperability-panel up for participation and funding. Part of what is offered with your involvement with NGI0 is help from us with your project on your copyright and license management.

After a quick check on your repository, I would like to propose some updates regarding copyright and licensing information in your files. Our REUSE specification (https://reuse.software) intends to make licensing easier with best practices to display legal information through comment headers on source files that can be easily human and machine readable. The REUSE tool makes the process of applying licenses to files and compliance checking much easier.

Instructions on how to install the REUSE tool can be found here: https://reuse.readthedocs.io/en/stable/readme.html#install

You can also check out this screencast for more instructions on how to use the REUSE tool: https://download.fsfe.org/videos/reuse/screencasts/reuse-tool.gif

The changes in this pull request have also been made for you to understand the basic ideas behind REUSE, and how adopting the REUSE practices would look like within your repository.

REUSE Features:

• SPDX copyright and license comment headers for relevant files.
• LICENSES directory with licenses used in the repository
• Associating copyright/licensing information through a DEP5 file in large directories.
Files Missing Copyright and Licensing Information
I've noticed that several files in your repository already contain information about the copyright and license information for the code in that particular file. That's great! Nevertheless, the idea behind REUSE is that every single file in your repository should have a header that includes this information.

To serve as an example, I added the SPDX headers with copyright and license information to the copyrightable files in a few of the directories (namely all the ".ttl" files in the /proposals/primer and /proposals/specification/snippets folders). This should give you an idea of how comment headers should look like in a REUSE compliant repository, and how they should be added to the other source code files in your repository.

Please also check if the personal information in these headers are correct and consistent to your knowledge. In the event that there are more copyright holders, please include them in these comment headers.
LICENSES Directory in the Root of the Project Repository

The LICENSES Folder should contain the license text of every license applicable in your repository. I included in this directory the file that contained the MIT and CC0 licenses.

Additionally, I included in this folder the text for the CC0 license. This is because you have files in your project that are not copyrightable, for example configuration files such as .gitignore. As the fundamental idea of REUSE is that all of your files will clearly have their copyright and licensing marked, I have applied the CC0 license to .gitignore, which is functionally identical to putting the file into the public domain.
Image files

Image Files

Additionally, I noticed that you have two image files ".svg" in the primer/images folder. For image files, we recommend creating a .license file, where you can include the comment headers for the license and copyright information. We've added comment headers to all the .svg files in images folder and listed the project Justin Bingham and elf Palvik as the copyright holders. Please feel free to modify and update this to your needs.

I hope that you find this useful. Feel free to adopt in case you feel REUSE may help your project with copyright and licensing management. Please feel free to contact me directly at jithendra@fsfe.org if you have any questions.

Best,
Jithendra
(Free Software Foundation Europe

[elf-pavlik]

Hello Jithendra,

Thank you for your contribution. Please allow us some time to consult with the rest of W3C Solid CG on this pull request. The spec & primers writing part, which part of my contributions are under the project with NLnet, is happening in this repo. There's also an implementation repo, in which the majority of my contributions are under the project with NLnet: sai-js.

Given the holiday season, it might take us some time to review this PR, I will kindly ask for your understanding.

Thank you

[elf-pavlik]

@Jit-p we are currently having a general discussion about licensing

• MIT License and/or W3C CLA and FSA process#327

We are trying to arrange a telecon with Rigo Wenning from W3C Legal Team, I hope I will be able to get some guidance with regard to this PR. BTW if you are interested please subscribe to that issue and feel welcome to join that call.

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This spec is using https://speced.github.io/bikeshed/ and all the main content is in *.bs files. It doesn't look like your PR is taking those into account. The final decision will arrive from the resolution to the issue I linked above but most likely we will use W3C CFA and later switch to W3C FSA for the final report.