Hello all,
I’m confused about the licensing terms of the OpenGL Registry headers, from glcorearb.h:
/*
** Copyright 2013-2020 The Khronos Group Inc.
** SPDX-License-Identifier: MIT
**
** This header is generated from the Khronos OpenGL / OpenGL ES XML
** API Registry. The current version of the Registry, generator scripts
** used to make the header, and the header can be found at
** https://github.com/KhronosGroup/OpenGL-Registry
*/
Yes, it does appear to be under the MIT license, but the SPDX license identifier is an insufficient replacement to the actual license text.
Glad and GLEW appear to have added their own copies of the MIT license, despite it not being in the official repository.
What about the XML API Registry, khrplatform.h header and even the Vulkan SDK/API Registry assets? They all appear to have this in common (Vulkan is under the Apache 2.0, though).
I thought I’d see chrome://credits to see what Google is doing, only to see the license template untouched:
...
identification within third-party archives.
Copyright [yyyy] [name of copyright owner]
Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the "License");
...
Can someone clear up this mess for me? And please correct me if I’m wrong. I’m very confused and I’m having trouble with using these excellent standards by Khronos.
Thank you for your time.
In what context is this insufficient? I thought the whole point of SPDX license identifiers is to have a standard way of saying “this product uses license X” without having to shove the text of “license X” into every page of the product.
I’m not a lawyer, nor am I experienced in the field of copyright practices, but it’s been discussed on this Stack Exchange question opensource(dot)stackexchange(dot)com /a/13157 (antispam is preventing me from using links) that it’s generally a bad practice and the full license text should be included.
Although SPDX is the only standard recognized by ISO as a standard for SBOM publication, it shouldn’t be used in this way; the REUSE project keeps the actual license texts in a folder IIRC, for example.
After some digging, it turns out that the complete license text used to be included with the headers and XML until this commit, quote from the commit:
The funny thing is, Khronos isn’t using REUSE yet, and the license text appears to be nowhere within the repository. And as I’ve said earlier, REUSE places the licenses in their own dedicated folder, despite relying on SPDX IDs.
The Vulkan Registry, on the other hand, has a clear COPYING and LICENSE file at the root dire tory of the repository.
So what do I do, open an issue?