On Wed, Mar 23, 2011 at 9:48 AM, Jilayne Lovejoy <Jlovejoy@...> wrote:

I believe we already discussed this to some degree and decided that we would not enter the arena of word equivalents with the exception of spelling variations for known American-British English.  Although there are certainly plenty of words that seem “safe” to equate, that begins to feel like a slippery slope in terms of the potential for different meanings or the license author’s intent getting altered.  More specifically, many licenses have definitions for such words.  Past and present tense can also be tricky, both from deciding how and when it’s okay to use either tense.  All in all, I think it’s best to take a very conservative approach to what we will “replace” in terms of templatizing the licenses.  We can always expand, but it would be very hard to roll it back later on.  Just my two cents.

I agree. I wonder if a solution is to allow the specification of "variant" of a license. Perhaps a way to say: the closest license is this one, with a text similarity metric of X, and where the differences are  such and such. Otherwise a lot of BSD and MIT licensed files will be listed as unknown/other.


--dmg
 

Certainly the BSD and Apache 1.1 licenses are problematic, because they are often verbatim with the exception of the author’s name in the third clause (BSD) and the third, fourth, and fifth clause (Apache 1.1) as well as the disclaimer sections for both.  We are working through how/where to capture this, as well as copyright notices in general, though.