Forums : Technical Issue Help

Hi there,

I searched the forum and found that quite a few had problem with license detection, BSD among others. My project, AVR-DRV, is under New BSD License (http://www.opensource.org/licenses/bsd-license.php).

I tried two way to write in in the code (one in trunk/avr-drv.c link , the other in any other .c/.h file link) and both are not detected.

Most of my files containt the license with doxygen tag in it(except trunk/avr-drv.c).

What is the correct way to write the BSD license in code so that Ohloh detects it?

Thanks

Frédéric Nadeau about 16 years ago

Hi Frédéric,

This was a bug on our end. Our detector was not working properly because of some whitespace differences between our expected license and the contents of the source file.

I've fixed our detector so that the whitespace differences are ignored, and the AVR-DRV now shows the FreeBSD 2-clause license in avr-drv.c.

Let me know if you expect the license to show in more files than this.

Thanks,
Robin

Robin Luckey about 16 years ago

Thanks for the quick reply(quick fix too by the way).

However, I'm still confuse as why it has been detected as a FreeBSD 2-clause license. (I'm no lawer and license issue are still mistery(sort of) to me)

As far as I can tell, the license found at top of avr-drv.c link is similar, if not exactly the same, to this one link

Might it be that there is no legal difference between the two, that I do not know, but I for sure would not like my name to appear anywhere whitout my prior concentment.

Thanks for your assistance
Frédéric Nadeau

Frédéric Nadeau about 16 years ago

This might help developers to solve this issue:

Project avr-libc is using New BSD License in all their files. Howevere there page list:
FreeBSD 2-clause license 717 files
New BSD License 11 files
BSD-ish License 3 files

Maybe developers have access to file names and could inform me on why and how(more importantly for me) these 11 files have been flaged has New BSD.

Best regards

Frédéric Nadeau about 16 years ago

Hi Frédéric,

There is a lot going on here. I'll try to keep it simple.

There are three BSD license variations recognized by Ohloh:

1. What Ohloh calls simply `bsd` refers to a license which specifically assigns ownership to the Regents of the University of California at Berkeley, regardless of the number of clauses. This is a special and unique license used only when the owner is the University of California.

2. The next variant of this license is called `bsd_ish` by Ohloh. This refers to a 3-clause BSD-style license which does not assign ownership to the Regents of the University of California. This is the most popular license variant found by Ohloh. It is commonly called the New BSD License or 3-clause BSD license.

3. The final variant is called `bsd_2clause_ish` by Ohloh. This is a variant which again does not assign ownership to the University of California, and which omits the third clause regarding endorsement.

Now come the problems.

First, Ohloh's detection had some bugs in it, which I have finally sorted out this morning, which caused us to substitute bsd_2clause_ish for bsd_ish in many cases. This bug is the reason why project avr-lib was showing the bsd_2clause_ish license in hundreds of files, when it should properly have the bsd_ish license.

This bug is now fixed, but projects will need to be re-analyzed for the fix to take effect.

Second, and much more confusing, is that the license text in your links above is editable by the public at large, like a wiki. Over time, helpful community members have edited these pages so that the licenses they contain no longer match the definitions used by Ohloh. This makes it very hard to figure out what is going on. Notably, the bsd definition has been edited by someone to be functionally the same as the bsd_ish definition.

I will edit the license wiki pages on Ohloh so that the definitions match those used by Ohloh.

It will take a few days for the new analyses to come through. After all of this, the BSD license issue should be improved considerably.

Thanks for your help,
Robin

Robin Luckey about 16 years ago

Thanks for taking care of this.

Frédéric Nadeau about 16 years ago