ruby / ruby/rubygems

Ambiguous gempsec "licenses" attribute

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type: feature request
Dominant language
Ruby
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Description

The current spec for Gems lead to some ambiguities in the license documentation.

The spec suggest to use "licenses" attribute for multiple licenses. https://guides.rubygems.org/specification-reference/#licenseslicenses ....yet there is nothing that says if all the licenses would apply or if this is a choice among the list of licenses. Therefore having this list of licenses is ambiguous:

  • GPL-2.0
  • MIT
    could either mean GPL-2.0 or MIT or GPL-2.0 and MIT and these are two very different licenses.

My suggestion would be to deprecate the "licenses" in favor of the single "license" string and allow to use SPDX license expressions in the "license" field. These are not ambiguous: GPL-2.0 and MIT is an example of such expression.

Tell me how I can help to make this happen.

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Contributor guide

Open the contributing guide

First steps

  1. Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
  2. Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
  3. Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
  4. Open a pull request that references the issue number.

Research direction

Start with the Gems specification reference linked in the issue, focusing on the license and licenses attributes and the ambiguity around multiple licenses. The issue is done when the project agrees on the intended semantics and documents an actionable specification change, including whether SPDX expressions are supported.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Assessment

Tech stack
ruby
Domain
tooling
Issue type
Feature
Difficulty
5/5
Estimated time
Over a week
Activity status
Stale
Clarity
Needs clarification
Newbie friendliness
25/100

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