Open Source Approved License® registry project underway with help of intern, Giulia Dellanoce

I shared last month the details of the new OSI website, hosted on WordPress. One of the main drivers for this upgrade was to unify OSI-approved licenses with all related metadata to a consistent, reliable and easy-to-access format. From there we can incorporate the outcome of the recommendations coming out of the License Review Working Group.

On the new site, we have created a database structure that includes metadata: category, version, release date, SPDX identifier, license steward, approval date, link to board minutes, canonical URL, leaving space to add more details like tags, all in a standardized, searchable format. You can see the database it in its current state here.

What’s really exciting is we have hired an intern, Giulia Dellanoce, to get this important project underway! Giulia will review the list of licenses and add all the missing metadata. Each record will have the following data and metadata:

• Name of license
• Text of license
• Version of license
• Date license was submitted
• URL evidencing submission (mailman archives or other evidence, if there is any)
• Date license was approved
• URL evidencing approval – ideally board minutes, email archive reporting approval as second choice
• License contact – name of person who submitted the license for approval
• License steward – name of person or entity that drafted the license
• Date an approved license was voluntarily retired or license steward reported it was superseded
• URL evidencing withdrawal of license
• SPDX identifier
• Notes about the license, if there are any comments on the current pages or from the board approval

And if we find the need to add more fields as he work progresses, we can do so in order to store data from the past in a structured format.

Giulia is coming on board with three major tasks:

1. Find and fill in all the missing metadata on the published License pages, as they’re currently available on opensource.org/licenses.
2. Review the mailing list archives and past board decisions to make sure that the list is complete.
3. Identify the licenses that have been reviewed and not approved, and those that have been submitted and either not approved or have been retracted.

OSI’s top priority is to modernize how the Open Source community identifies which licenses have gained OSI approval and maintain opensource.org as a trusted online authority. This Approval Registry will serve as a comprehensive and authoritative resource of all licenses so organizations can be confident that the license they choose for their project complies with the Open Source Definition, allowing software to be freely used, modified, shared and monetized.

Please join us in welcoming Giulia to the OSI community! She comes to us after earning her Master’s Degree and spending some time working at a law firm, a startup and as a intern at the Public Prosecutor’s office in Pavia in Italy.

Also join us in thanking Slim.AI, who’s donation to OSI is supporting this internship. Slim.AI, working to optimize and secure cloud-native applications, is a champion of Open Source. Their Open Source Slim Toolkit inspects, optimizes and debugs containers, and is licensed under an Apache 2 license. Slim.AI recognizes the benefit they and other companies receive by having a trustable, centralized list of Open Source Approved License®  accessible via API.