THE SPDX WIKI IS NO LONGER ACTIVE. ALL CONTENT HAS BEEN MOVED TO https://github.com/spdx
GSOC/GSOC ProjectIdeas
Welcome to the 2020 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.
Contents
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 Documents in multiple formats
- 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 with 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 and on gitter (see resources). There is however a weekly call you could join as well. .
Resources
Proposed 2020 Projects
Mentors: please fill out the following template for any projects you wish to propose.
=== Project Name === add overview of project here ====Skills Needed==== what skills should the student have to do the coding exercises ====Background Information==== context for the project and references to be studied ====Available Mentors==== list individuals who are willing to mentor and provide information about the project proposal.
(The projects from last year can be found on the 2019 Google Summer of Code projects page for SPDX ).
SPDX Workgroup Tooling Projects
These projects are aimed at contributing to the SPDX tools to help reduce the effort to create SPDX documents and increase the accuracy of them.
Develop a Distributed License Repository Management Application
Develop an application which accepts links to repositories of SPDX licenses and maintains information on the collection of all licenses references in the repositories. The interface the application would be a REST API. The application could also include a web based user interface. The application would periodically monitor the external repositories for any updates to the licenses. The application would support the following use cases:
- See if a license text has already been registered or if license text is already on the SPDX License List.
- See if the license text for a license matches license text for other licenses within the same repository.
- See if the license text for a license matches license text for other licenses within other repositories.
- Maintain a list of license aliases, preferably as a file in a github repositories. The aliases would include all license ID's for licenses with the same text.
- Provide a service that allows for text to be compared against all existing licenses.
- Promote a license to the license list - this would call the REST API's for the online tool to add a license to the SPDX license list.
- Remove a license repository. This would also update the license aliases.
- Provide metrics on use for licenses to help the SPDX legal team propose licenses which should be on the SPDX license list.
Background Information
See the above project idea "Registry and Repository of License List Namespaces" for background on the license name spaces. This project provides additional support for managing the namespace.
Skills Needed
- Development skills in the Python, Java or JavaScript language
- Understanding of Github API's
- Ability to work with the user community in refining requirements
- REST API development
Available Mentors
SPDX Specification Projects
The following projects contribute directly to the creation or validation of the SPDX 2.1 specification.
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
