Qualitas Corpus Contents Licenses
The metadata includes information regarding what license the sysver
(usually referring to the source distribution) is released under. However no
guarantee can be made regarding the accuracy of this information.
For most of the sysvers, the license they are distributed under is clear,
but there are some (maybe as much as 10%) where it is not clear. There is
also the possibility that what is recorded is wrong because the sheer volume
of data could mean that mistakes were made or what's given is not complete.
Examples of such issues are given below. There are also some cases where the
information is not available.
The information provided is a string that is believed to identify the
relevant license, and a location that contains that string. Part of the
corpus release process is to confirm that, where the location is a file in
the sysver distribution, that the specified file contains the specified
string. However it is possible that the wrong file was specified, or that
there is no such file.
Examples of possible issues in this information are:
- A number of sysvers include multiple licence statements (e.g. for
third-party libraries that they use). It could be that the wrong license was
attributed to the sysver either by simple mistake, or because it wasn't
obvious which license applied to the sysver.
- Some sysvers are released under multiple licenses. As of the
more recent release of the corpus only one license is listed, although this
probably needs to be changed.
- Some sysvers have licenses that don't appear to apply to the entire
code base. In most cases, the exceptions seem to be the third-party
libraries they use, but there are some cases where it is not clear what
exactly the licenses apply to.
- Some sysvers do not provide the text of the license, but do provide
license information in some form that refers to the text. In these cases,
the location is given as the file provided.
- Some sysvers provide no (clear) license information. In some such
cases, some attempt has been made to determine license information from
other sources (e.g. a website), but this activity is incomplete. There are
external locations (URLs) or empty entries in this case.
History
- 20130901
-
Most sysvers had some license information provided, but there were
still a few gaps, and the possibility that some information was wrong.
- 20120401
-
Some license information was added with this release but it was very
incomplete and the information provided was inconsistent (in that often
different license information for different sysvers was given).