Technical Team/Proposals/2013-6-13/License Template

1 License Template Certain sections of a license vary as they are used. Some of this variability is by design (think of the BSD family of licenses). In other cases it is due to small changes in licenses as they are copied and propagated. The License Template describes which sections of the license can be varied and which sections have standard text.

1.1 Standard License List Template Download The SPDX Standard License List will maintain a template for each of the licenses in the SPDX Standard License List. The download location for the current version can be found in the link at the bottom of the page spdx.org/licenses.

1.2 Standard License List Template RDFa Access The template text for the standard license can be accessed using the RDF tag licenseTemplate on the web page containing the standard license.

1.3 Template Format A variable section of a license is specified with a rule. A rule is wrapped between double curly braces “{{}}” and is composed of 5 parts. Each is separated with a semi-colon “;”. Rules cannot be embedded within other rules.

Rules begin with a case sensitive tag followed by a colon “:”.

Rule parts:

• original: the original text of the rule. It should be the first field. It is required.
• match: a POSIX ERE regular expression (see below). This field is required.
• name: name of the field in the template. This field is required.
• type: one of “required” or “optional” (case sensitive). This field is required.
  • “required” indicates that text matching the regular express must be supplied to be a valid license
  • “optional” indicates that no text is required, but can be optionally supplied
• example: another example of the use of the text. This field is optional.

The POSIX ERE regular expression has the following restrictions and extensions:

• Semicolons are escaped with \;
• POSIX Bracket Extensions are not allowed

Example:

see the word doc for the example