Bad license format

[hendrikebbers]

Most repositories of JakartaEE store the EPL license in a markdown file (example: https://github.com/jakartaee/jsonp-api).
By doing so GitHub understands that a license is present but can not interpret it. Based on that the license name is not shown in the GitHub ui and the GitHub API returns "OTHER" for the license.

"license": {
    "key": "other",
    "name": "Other",
    "spdx_id": "NOASSERTION",
    "url": null,
    "node_id": "MDc6TGljZW5zZTA="
  }

By switching the license file to plain text GitHub will understand it, show EPL directly in the UI and provides all metadata by the REST API:

{
  "key": "epl-2.0",
  "name": "Eclipse Public License 2.0",
  "spdx_id": "EPL-2.0",
  "url": "https://api.github.com/licenses/epl-2.0",
  "node_id": "MDc6TGljZW5zZTMy",
  ...
}

A sample can be found at https://github.com/hendrikebbers/jsonp-api

I will be happy to help here and refactor the license files in a better format if you give me the go :)

[oliviergoulet5]

Hi @hendrikebbers,

I'm unsure whether this is the best place to create this issue. This is the repo for the Jakarta EE website.

Perhaps @TanjaObradovic can help you communicate your request to the Jakarta EE repos?

[hendrikebbers]

@TanjaObradovic @ivargrimstad what is the best place for such issue and can you transfer it?

[ivargrimstad]

@TanjaObradovic @ivargrimstad what is the best place for such issue and can you transfer it?

This is probably not an isolated Jakarta EE issue. Most likely affecting all Eclipse Foundation projects. I think we probably should create a GitLab issue for someone in the EMO or Webdev to look at.

[hendrikebbers]

@waynebeaton might the the best person in that case, right?

[waynebeaton]

AFAICT, it's not the markdown formatting that's the problem. Rather, the problem is that the license file contains three different texts. GitHub correctly understands that the license is complex.

An important detail here is that the Jakarta JSON-P project uses the EPL-2.0 with a secondary licence. Stating the licence as "EPL-2.0" isn't correct.

In SPDX terms, the licence expression is EPL-2.0 or GPL-2.0-only with Classpath-Exception-2.0.

I'm not aware of a means by which we can make GitHub accurately reflect a licence expression.

If you want to pursue this more broadly, open an help desk issue and we'll figure out where to move it.