License Artifact Specifier

Version 0.1

Overview

This proposal extends the URI Syntax proposal: /URISyntax

License artifacts are artifacts containing the license for a specific version of a project.

The key aims of this proposal are to:

• formalise artifact-specifier for license artifacts;
• provide a set of best practices for such artifacts; and
• enable tools to construct a URI to unambigously locate a particular license artifact using a set of known criteria

URI Components

An absolute repository URI is written as follows: {{{ repository-uri = access-specifier "/" product-specifier "/"

• version-specifier "/" artifact-specifier }}}

For license artifacts, artifact-specifier is: {{{ artifact-specifier = license-specifier

• license-specifier = "licenses" "/" license-name license-name = LICENSE.txt | path_segment

  (path_segment is per http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2396.txt) }}}

Rationale

   TODO:

• LICENSE.txt is currently used by maven.
• the proposed ASL 2.0 adds a NOTICE file.

  See http://www.apache.org/licenses/proposed/ 

Tool support

Tools can unambigously locate a license artifact given the project-version URI.

E.g, given:   uri = http://repo.apache.org/apache/ant/1.5.4/ 

The license artifact URI would be:   uri = http://repo.apache.org/apache/ant/1.5.4/licences/LICENSE.txt 

URI Examples

{{{ http://repo.apache.org/apache/ant/1.5.4/licences/LICENSE.txt

• http://repo.apache.org/apache/commons-cli/1.0/licences/LICENSE.txt http://repo.apache.org/apache/commons-cli/2.0/licences/LICENSE.txt }}}