pombredanne/metaeffekt-universe

Project providing insights on the metaeffekt license database.

{metæffekt}-universe

Project providing insights on the {metæffekt} license database covering

• 2003 modelled license terms,
• 117 exceptions,
• 168 specific and commonly used license expressions, and
• 45 markers.

as of 25th, April 2023.

The following links provide letter-specific overviews on the license information:

3 - 4 - a - b - c - d - e - f - g - h - i - j - k - l - m - n - o - p - q - r - s - t - u - v - w - x - y - z

The yaml files within the subfolders show metadata on the individual licenses and exceptions. The files also contain alternative names that support the normalization of licenses and exceptions.

Why another list of licenses and exceptions?

{metæffekt} follows a defined strategy for analyzing, scanning and documenting software projects. To do this, a consistent information/data baseline is required. This baseline must cover the different license types that are used by the software stacks being examined.

OSI, SPDX and the ScanCode Toolkit provide a good representation of licenses and exceptions in the FOSS domain. However, the license identification and matching strategies are not fully compatible with the level of granularity and paradigms set forth by {metæffekt}. Second, the data does not cover publicly available commercial licenses (at least not to the extend required).

This is why {metæffekt} choose to create an overarching database of licenses, references, exceptions, and expressions; the {metæffekt}-universe.

Is {metæffekt} handing back to the FOSS Compliance Community?

Sure. We intend to provide those parts of our {metæffekt}-universe to the community, which we are allowed to share.

The only issue is time and resources. {metæffekt} is a self-financed company that makes a living from customer projects. With our limited time and resources we have to be very focused. We are ready to do community work, once we see that there is an interest in our results.

So if you see that this material can be useful to you or ease your work, let us know. We are looking forward to intensify our community engagement or to start off new projects.

Disclaimer

This is all work in progress and subject to continuous improvement. In particular, ScanCode identifications and ScanCode matching is used to validate the dataset and synchronize the different sources.

Please note that the {metæffekt}-universe as displayed in this repository is a converted, reduced dataset from a more extensive internal representation. The internal representation models licenses explicitly and is used for deterministic license matching based on evidences and patterns.

The internal representation (and therefore the content shown here) is based on SPDX and ScanCode.

All company names, organization names, license names, and product names mentioned in this documentation are used for identification purposes only.

Licensing

• SPDX - The license list is used under Creative Commons BY-3.0.

  © 2018 SPDX Workgroup a Linux Foundation Project. All Rights Reserved.

• ScanCode Toolkit - ScanCode license data is used under Creative Commons BY-4.0.

  Copyright (c) nexB Inc. and others. All rights reserved. ScanCode is a trademark of nexB Inc.

• Open CoDE License Compliance approval information is Open CoDE Public Domain. The status information shown reflects version 1.0 from February 2022.

The content provided in {metæffekt}-universe is licensed under Creative Commons BY-4.0.

Copyright © metaeffekt GmbH 2021. All rights reserved.

Contribution

As this repository is largely showing converted data a direct contribution in the form of patches is not appropriate. You may send requests for corrections or questions to [email protected]. Modifications will then be applied to the internal dataset to produce the corrected outputs.

Further information

{metæffekt} provides visualization of the {metæffekt}-universe on https://metaeffekt.com/#universe.

Currently, ScanCode version 31.2.1 is used.

Regarding SPDX the latest version from https://github.com/spdx/license-list-data main branch is used to synchronize the {metæffekt}-universe.