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Consistent licensing across NSLS-II and Bluesky projects #89

@MikeHart85

Description

@MikeHart85

@danielballan and I noticed that GitHub doesn't recognize or label most Bluesky projects as having a BSD 3-Clause license, even though they ship with what we consider a BSD 3-Clause license.

This means they don't get a prominent license tag that identifies the license at the top of the project landing page:

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And they also don't get a header providing a quick overview of license features when you view the license file:

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Note that this project is correctly recognized. Ophyd, for example, is not.

The reason for this are differences in the LICENSE file, deviating from what GitHub recognizes as a standard BSD 3-Clause license. We think this is worth fixing, as there is both legal and social value in using an established and recognizable license with minimal deviations.

Reference for what GitHub recognizes as standard: BSD 3-Clause

The current LICENSE in this repo matches this exactly, changing only the [year] and replacing [fullname] with "Brookhaven National Laboratory".

The current LICENSE in many other NSLS-II and Bluesky repos has the following differences:

  1. Missing explicit BSD 3-Clause License declaration on line 1
  2. Names Brookhaven Science Associates as copyright holder in addition to Brookhaven National Laboratory
  3. Has All rights reserved. on same line as copyright, instead of its own line below it
  4. Uses bullet points instead of numbered list of clauses
  5. Modified Clause 3 to again explicitly name Brookhaven Science Associates, Brookhaven National Laboratory as copyright holder, replacing the default reference: the copyright holder

Points 1, 3 and 4 should be straightforward fixes.

Points 2 and 5 require attention.

Once we have answers to the above, the next steps would be:

  • Update LICENSE in this repo to comply with requirements
  • Ensure updated LICENSE is still recognized by GitHub, fix if not
  • Update LICENSEs in other repos to match this one

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