scancode licence naming vs. SDPX-ID

[tgodau]

Hi Philippe and contributors,

I was wondering why scancode-toolkit doesn't use the SPDX-ID for naming of identified license texts in a lot of cases.
There are several examples:

"historical" is actually "HPND", "ibmpl-1.0" is actually "IPL-1.0","bsd-simplified" is actually "BSD-2-Clause", "mit-export-control" is actually "Xerox", "bsd-new" is actually "BSD-3-Clause", "boost-1.0" is actually "BSL-1.0, "mit-modern" is actually "MIT-Modern-Variant", ...

I am sure there is a good reason for, but I am not clear why.
Would be great to have a little explanantion.

Thank you very much.

Best regards, Thorsten

[tgodau]

Sorry, had tomatos on my eyes. Totally missed "license_expression_spdx"...

[AyanSinhaMahapatra]

@tgodau thanks for the question, you said:

I was wondering why scancode-toolkit doesn't use the SPDX-ID for naming of identified license texts in a lot of cases.
There are several examples: "historical" is actually "HPND", "ibmpl-1.0" is actually "IPL-1.0","bsd-simplified" is actually "BSD-2-Clause",

Note also that many of the licenses added in SPDX license lists are already present in scancode-toolkit as licenses/rules and in that sense these license IDs most of the time predates the SPDX ID. See PRs where we update the SPDX license list version in scancode:

• Update licenses from SPDX License List 3.26 and others #4081
• Synchronize Licenses and update SPDX License List to 3.25.0 #3897
• Update to SPDX license list 3.24.0 #3795
• Support SPDX License List 3.23 #3653

Here if we already have the same license in scancode, we only update the SPDX license ID from scancode-licenseref to the new SPDX assigned key. If we didn't have the license in scancode previously, we almost always use the SPDX key assigned AFAIK. SPDX sometimes uses the scancode key when they find a new license, but more often then not they don't.

Totally missed "license_expression_spdx"...

Yes, we always display the SPDX license expression side by side atleast, and in many places we even give more priority to the SPDX license expression as it is standard.

Also, you can also use the discussions feature, if you are not sure if the question is an issue or just needs discussion. In this case you had a valid question anyway.