Revision as of 23:57, 19 March 2018

Welcome to the 2018 SPDX Google Summer of Code Project Page

See the proposal template if you are interested in submitting a Google Summer of Code proposal.

Should you have questions please do not hesitate to contact one of the mentors directly.

What is SPDX ?

First and foremost we are a community dedicated to solving the issues and problems around Open Source licensing and compliance. The SPDX work group (part of the Linux Foundation) consists of individuals, community members, and representatives from companies, foundations and organizations who use or are considering using the SPDX standard. The work group operates much like a meritocratic, consensus-based community project; that is, anyone with an interest in the project can join the community, contribute to the specification, and participate in the decision-making process. We come from many different backgrounds including open source developers, lawyers, consultants and business professionals, many of who have been involved with license compliance and identification for years.

As part of this effort we have developed a set of collateral that can be used:

• License List and Short Identifiers
• SPDX Specification for generating SPDX Doucments in either RDF or Tag/Value format
• A set of basic tools for working with SPDX Documents
• License Identifiers in source

Why choose an SPDX Project?

Contributing to one of the SPDX projects below will provide a valuable contribution to developers and/or users of open source software. We believe you will find the projects both technically challenging and rewarding. In essence we believe you will be able to look back one day and I say I was part of that effort.

Getting Involved

Beyond working wth your mentor(s) we highly encourage students who select one of these projects to get involved with the SPDX community via our technical working group. Interaction with the technical team is primarily done via its mailing list (see resources). There is however a weekly call you could join as well. All of the daily work for the Tech team is done on this wiki.

Resources

• SPDX website
• SPDX Specification
• SPDX Workgroup Tools webpage
• SPDX tech mailing list

SPDX Workgroup Tooling Projects

These projects are aimed at contributing to the SPDX tools to help reduce the effort to create SPDX and increase the accuracy of the SPDX documents.

Add New License Submital Feature to Online Tools

The SPDX license list (see https://spdx.org/licenses/) is maintained by the SPDX legal team. The source for the license license list is maintained in the SPDX license-list-XML github repository (https://github.com/spdx/license-list-XML). Currently, new licenses are submitted through emails to the SPDX legal team and the license XML files are manually generated.

An online program could be created which would take all the relevant data (e.g. license name, URL to original link, license text), notify the legal team of the submission and create a pull request with the proper license XML format. Additional, optional useful features could include comparing the license text to existing licenses to avoid duplication, allow demarking optional text and tracking the approval status.

This project could be implemented in Python in the existing online tools.

Skills Needed

• Development skills in the Python language
• Knowledge of Git
• Understanding of XML

Available Mentors

Gary O'Neall Rohit Lodha

Update Parser Libraries to SPDX 2.1 for GO

Update one of the SPDX GO libraries to the SPDX 2.1 specification. The SPDX 2.1 specification is a major upgrade from SPDX 1.2 supporting relationships between SPDX documents and SPDX elements.

Skills Needed

• Development skills in the GO language
• Experience with parser development
• Understanding of RDF and XML

Background Information

SPDX currently provides libraries supporting the reading and writing of SPDX document. Currently, only Java libraries support the new SPDX 2.1 specification. The Python libraries and the GO libraries support version 1.2 of the spec. The libraries must support both RDF/XML import/export as well as tag/value import/export. The [SPDX git repository] SPDX Tools project contains the source code for the libraries.

Available Mentors

Gary O'Neall

Update Python SPDX library to SPDX 2.1

Update one of the SPDX Python libraries to the SPDX 2.1 specification. The SPDX 2.1 specification is a major upgrade from SPDX 1.2 supporting relationships between SPDX documents and SPDX elements.

Skills Needed

• Development skills in the Python language

Background Information

SPDX currently provides libraries supporting the reading and writing of SPDX document. Currently, only Java libraries support the new SPDX 2.1 specification. The Python library support version 1.2 of the spec. The library must support primarily the tag/value import/export and also the RDF/XML import/export. The [SPDX git repository] SPDX Tools project contains the source code for this library.

Available Mentors

Philippe Ombredanne Rohit Lodha

Add support for SPDX license expression to Python library

Update the [[1]|SPDX Python library]] to fully support license expression.

Skills Needed

• Development skills in the Python language

Background Information

See https://github.com/spdx/tools-python/issues/10 and https://github.com/nexB/license-expression/

Available Mentors

Philippe Ombredanne Rohit Lodha

Port SPDX license expression library to Ruby, JavaScript and Java

The [[2]|licens_expressionlibrary]] provides comprehensive support license expression using a boolean engine for Python. The goal of this project is to port and/or package this library for JavaScript, Ruby and Java, considering either code conversion tools, alternative Python implementations (e.g. Jython) or calling Python from another language to bring the same features to these other languages.

Skills Needed

• Development skills in Python, Java, Ruby, JavaScript.

Background Information

See https://github.com/spdx/tools-python/issues/10 and https://github.com/nexB/license-expression/

Available Mentors

Philippe Ombredanne

Build Tool SPDX File Generators

Support a continuous integration (CI) generation of SPDX files by creating a plugins or extensions to build tools. These plugins or extensions will generate valid SPDX documents based on the build file metadata and source files.

Skills Needed

• Experience developing parser/scanners
• Experience with the specific build tools

Background Information

Many build environments include license information in their metadata but do not produce sufficient information for good license compliance. By adding SPDX generation to these build environments, high quality licensing information can be captured in a way which is easily used by downstream users of the code. Following is a partial list of popular build environments/package managers which do not have an SPDX generation capability:

• MSBuild
• PIP
• NPM (Note: NPM does include SPDX compliance license information and tools)
• DEB

The Yocto build environment currently has some SPDX file generation capabilities, but there is a need for some additional work to integrate some of the existing tools into a more complete integrated toolset. The SPDX Maven Plugin is an example of an existing build tool SPDX generator.

Available Mentors

Gary O'Neall Philippe Ombredanne

SPDX Specification Projects

The following projects contribute directly to the creation or validation of the SPDX 2.1 specification.

SPDX Specification in MarkDown

Migrate the specification from Google docs to GitHub+MarkDown based toolchain capable of generating HTML, PDF and EPUB

Skills Needed

• Understanding of documentation tooling
• Web-development skills to style HTML version

Background Information

The 2.1 SPDX specification PDF and HTML version have several issues. 1. Navigation through both document is difficult as a index is missing 2. Switching to GitHub+MarkDown will remove friction for contributors to comment/amend the specification. Common workflow within the OSS community

Available Mentors

Kate Stewart Thomas Steenbergen

SPDX Specification Wiki Examples of Package Managers

SPDX specification describes on a high level how to describe package, files and snippets but lack examples how to capture the use of package managers

Skills Needed

• Understanding of package managers

Background Information

To encourage adoption of SPDX it should be clear how to encode the use of common programming language package managers within SPDX. The aim of this project is to create example per build tool/package manager so that not only as example to the community but also form the input for SPDX tech team discussions and future tooling development

Initial package managers:

• Bower
• CocoaPods
• Gradle
• gem
• gitmodules
• Maven
• npm
• PyPi
• sbt
• NuGet

Available Mentors

Thomas Steenbergen

SPDX Specification Views for legal counsels and developers

The proposal is to see if it possible to deduct large SPDX documents into a small subset SPDX document providing a specific reduced "views" on larger data.

Skills Needed

• Understanding of compliance needs of legal counsels and developers so we can remove friction to adopt SPDX

Background Information

SPDX documents commonly contain 100s, if not 1000s of entries making it hard for a human to make manual corrections or draw conclusions. No scanner can provide 100% complete data human corrections are usual needed. The aim from this proposal is twofold: 1. Enable developers with a "code view" of tool-generated SPDX document close to the code they work on to enable them to make corrections to the SPDX data. For instance amend SPDX package tag values or model package dependencies not detected by used scanner. 2. Provide legal counsels with a "package and limited file view" to enable legal conclusions

Available Mentors

Thomas Steenbergen Yev Bronshteyn