OSGeo Community project application: Check file headers and double check license has been appropriately applied

[Jody Garnett]

Jody here from the incubation list, going to try and manage communication in your issue tracker as we keep dropping things in email.

One of the requirements is that we ask projects to have a “We ask that the project team check the file headers and double check the license has been appropriately applied.”

I could not find a wiki page, or issue tracker ticket, where your team has done this work.

Doing a few spot checks shows that the codebase does not presently use headers.

• https://bitbucket.org/geowerkstatt-hamburg/masterportal/src/dev/modules/menu/checkChildrenDatasets.js (no header)
• https://bitbucket.org/geowerkstatt-hamburg/masterportal/src/dev/modules/menu/desktop/staticlink/view.js (no header)

Not using headers is unusual, but fine if your team has another way to check the MIT license has been appropriately applied to the source code you are distributing.

Aside: Teams traditionally find a few code snippets from stack exchange, or an example from another project, that requires attention.

[Jody Garnett]

As example of work other teams have done to review headers:

• We are really just looking for a statement from your team that you have obtained permission to release the source code under an open source license.

  • open data cube said: File headers have been implemented on all Python files in the datacube-core project

• Headers is a really easy way to check that, and although not legally required for copyright, they do provide an indication to anyone obtaining your source code via web search that the code is available to re-use under an MIT license. Replying on the LICENSE.txt in the root of the source tree is fine; but not everyone see the full source tree.

During incubation projects go into more detail checking file history if required:

• https://github.com/geopython/pygeoapi/wiki/ProjectProvenanceReview

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[Friedrich Müller]

@Jody Garnett Thank you very much for the hints.

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Until now we checked for license issues during Pull Request process.

We stated this approach now explicitly in our readme: https://bitbucket.org/geowerkstatt-hamburg/masterportal/pull-requests/4579

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In former Versions we mentioned it within the jsdoc:

https://bitbucket.org/geowerkstatt-hamburg/masterportal/src/61b9dfc15b340b93a029e6d4c28f792bdaf6b3d1/src/app-store/actions.js#lines-7

Currently we use headers where external taken code is used

e.g. https://bitbucket.org/geowerkstatt-hamburg/masterportal/src/dev/test/end2end/library/reporter.js

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Is this enough to fulfill this requirement?

Would it be enough to have a statement e.g. in the readme that license issues are proved during PR process and license statements are added where necessary?

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Best regards,

[Jody Garnett]

I think that captures what you have done perviously: Reading above I found a few files that were missing headers.

So I think you could uses a double check of the existing codebase as some things have been missed…
(this activity is the key bit of work that is required to join the osgeo community program; but it can be accomplished with a script in many cases).