Skip to main content

What can be reused from SPDX?

Portal Admin
Published on: 10/02/2012 Discussion Archived

As discussed in ADMS.F/OSS: Virtual Meeting 2012.02.07, the Working Group must consider the SPDX for reuse. To this end, the differences and commonalities between both undertakings must be made explicit.

Component

Code

Category

Related Work

Comments

stijngoedertier (not verified) Wed, 30/05/2012 - 18:03

Both specifications have different use cases:

  • SPDX is a standard for describing the components, copyrights, and licences of a software package. The main use case is for producers of software packages to describe the licensing condintions in a machine-readable format and for consumers of software packages to more easily verify that they comply with the licensing terms of the software package. SPDX has the potential to greatly simply the "supply chain" of software (re-)distribution. Suppliers of software packages would normally include an SPDX RDF file within the software package, although this is not a requirement by the specification.
  • ADMS.F/OSS v0.3 is a specification for describing software projects, software assets, and software distributions. Its main use case is to allow creating (federated) catalogues of software descriptions making it possible for consumers to explore, find, identify, select, and obtain software from a single point of access.

Both specifications also have a different conceptualisation: SPDX is not concerned with metadata about "immaterial" concepts such as the "admssw:software project" or the "admsw:software asset", but it provides detailed licensing infromation about the "spdx:Package" and "spdx:File". In my opinion, both the concepts "spdx:package" and "spdx:file" maps to the concept "admssw:software distribution", which is the physical embodiment of an asset.

There is a combined use case possible: the SPDX licensing information of software packages can also be included in software catalogues, making it possible for users to explore, find, identify, select, and obtain SPDX licensing metadata about "spdx:software packages" from a software catalogue.

stijngoedertier (not verified) Tue, 05/06/2012 - 11:33

Proposal: To realise this synergy the following relationships should be added to the ADMS.F/OSS conceptual model and RDF Schema:

SPDX is Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution License 3.0 unported.

 

Login or create an account to comment.