tag:help.rubygems.org,2010-01-19:/discussions/suggestions/29-feature-suggestion-copyright-and-license-information-in-gemspecRubyGems.org: Discussion 2015-08-17T20:13:18Ztag:help.rubygems.org,2010-01-19:Comment/53298532011-09-23T15:07:29Z2011-09-23T15:07:29ZFeature Suggestion: Copyright and License Information in GemSpec<div><p>This one was buried in our spam filter, just unearthed it.
Sorry.</p>
<p>The gemspec is really hard to modify, but this information is
usually in the readme and included in the gem itself. Whats the
usefulness of exposing it at the gemspec level?</p>
<p>Also we've talked about having metadata in the gemspec for a
while, that would allow this to happen but that also is really
difficult to implement (and support).</p></div>Nick Quarantotag:help.rubygems.org,2010-01-19:Comment/53298532011-09-23T15:36:24Z2011-09-23T15:36:28ZFeature Suggestion: Copyright and License Information in GemSpec<div><p>The usefulness of exposing this at the gemspec level and
encouraging gem authors to complete these fields is that it allows
automated tools to collect all the copyright/licensing information
about all of an application's dependencies, sub-dependencies,
sub-sub-dependencies, etc.</p>
<p>The tool can then do such things as confirm that all the
dependencies in the dependency tree are licensed under a compatible
license, build a table of all the dependencies in the dependency
tree including the copyright holder's name and the licenses,
etc.</p>
<p>The gemspec is the only source of information about a gem that
is easily available to tools. It's the place to go to put this
information.</p>
<p>Many applications out there depend on hundreds of gems. It is
important for whoever is running or distributing an application to
verify, months down the road and in an automated way, that he is
complying with all of the licenses. Currently, a lot of people need
to verify all this stuff by hand, which takes a lot of time.</p></div>y_feldblumtag:help.rubygems.org,2010-01-19:Comment/53298532011-09-23T19:38:42Z2011-09-23T19:38:42ZFeature Suggestion: Copyright and License Information in GemSpec<div><p>Yeah, I definitely this is a further case to get metadata in. I
think you should post these ideas to rubygems-developers and then
we can get some more comments on it. Basically, I think this could
be one of several attributes that can be part of the "metadata
spec" and help to strengthen the argument to include it.</p>
<p><a href=
"http://rubyforge.org/mailman/listinfo/rubygems-developers">http://rubyforge.org/mailman/listinfo/rubygems-developers</a></p></div>Nick Quarantotag:help.rubygems.org,2010-01-19:Comment/53298532012-03-13T20:32:04Z2012-03-13T20:32:05ZFeature Suggestion: Copyright and License Information in GemSpec<div><p>SourceNinja pulls the data from these gems and uses that
information. I am sure you guys could also.</p></div>Brett Hardintag:help.rubygems.org,2010-01-19:Comment/53298532012-03-14T05:38:15Z2012-03-14T05:38:15ZFeature Suggestion: Copyright and License Information in GemSpec<div><p>How are the combination of license, authors and date
insufficient for determining this information? Copyright (in the
US, at least) is automatically granted without need to file and the
expiry date should be determinable from the date embedded in the
gem.</p>
<p>As mentioned, the license field already exists.</p></div>Eric Hodel