Include licensing information

[Floppy]

It would be good to be able to store license metadata perhaps? At the very least, commercial vs free.

NLNet Milestone 1.4

[ksuquix]

Seems like a good thing to just document how to use Tags to manage. There are so many types of licenses it would be easier to let the user just tag things properly i'd think.

[silbe]

Not sure if you're already aware of it: SPDX has a nomenclature of licenses (license identifiers, also known as SPDX IDs). Would be great to have it as actual structured metadata that can be searched for rather than just free-form tags. Unfortunately many otherwise "open" licenses are incompatible with each other so when combining things the license is important. 😫

(FWIW I am not using VanDAM but I am interested in a non-profit alternative to printables / thingiverse and the ActivityPub federation discussed in #1389 looks like it might be a good fit).

[Floppy]

Thanks! I was thinking of basing the metadata around Datapackage, which uses Open Definition license identifiers, but that's mainly because my background on this is open data focused, so I'll make sure I look at SPDX as well. Structured data is definitely the way forward, I agree.

There's more on this in #1040, which talks about defining a common package metadata format for 3d models, so you'll probably find that of interest too.

[Floppy]

Leaving myself a link here to the SPDX license list, which includes all sorts of things both data and source focused, so looks like a great standard to adopt: https://spdx.org/licenses/

I think the two are probably convergent anyway, certainly a brief skim looks that way.

[Floppy]

Ah, yes, the OD list explicitly conformed to SPDX years ago, so that's good. We're talking about the same things :)

[silbe]

Thanks for the pointer, I wasn't aware of the Open Definition license identifiers. (snipping some parts obsoleted by your last comment 😉 ) Great that the overlap is explicitly compatible with SPDX. 😌

For what it's worth, SPDX has some more nuanced identifiers (e.g. GPL-2.0-only and GPL-2.0-or-later vs. just GPL-2.0 in Open Definition) and a syntax to express different combinations of licenses (e.g. MIT OR Apache-2.0 if you can choose either vs. MIT AND Apache-2.0 if you need to comply with both).

But for just locating models Open Definition is most likely good enough. Using an established scheme for easier interoperation is more important.

[Floppy]

Well we both learned something! SPDX looks like the right approach; thanks for the pointer.

[Floppy]

The one thing SPDX doesn't have is an identifier for a generic commercial license (intentionally). https://scancode-licensedb.aboutcode.org/commercial-license.html is the best thing I've found after looking through a few discussion threads, so we can use LicenseRef-scancode-commercial-license for that case.