Explore auto-generating license info on empty repos

[arowla]

Default output from the template is not sufficiently explanatory:

# Licenses that apply to the project and/or its components (required)
# Items by property name pattern:
#   .*:
#     name: Name of the license from the Software Package Data Exchange (SPDX): https://spdx.org/licenses/
#     url: URL for the text of the license
licenses:
  placeholder_label:

I can't tell if placeholder_label is something I'm supposed to understand in this context, or if it's a sign of something unfinished.

Upon looking at this repo's own .about.yml, I see the licenses field looks like this:

licenses:
  .about.yml:
    name: CC0
    url: https://github.com/18F/about_yml/blob/master/LICENSE.md

It's not clear (at least for basic projects) why we should have to re-specify the name of the repo in order to specify its license.

I'd also vote for this field being auto-generated with CC0 filled in, since I think all 18F projects are under the same license.

[monfresh]

+1 on auto-generating with sensible defaults. As for specifying the name of the repo, I wonder if it's because some repos are forks of other repos, or inspired by other repos, and might include additional licenses for the borrowed code?

[mbland]

Yeah, I was just going with the existing project YAML format here, which started life in the Dashboard. @gboone or @ultrasaurus, any idea why licenses was modeled this way to begin with?

[mtorres253]

Needs discussion. Taxonomy exercise?

[ultrasaurus]

yep, some repos are forked or contain stuff with other licenses. The code we make is CC0, but we can use / modify / contribute to code with other open source licenses.

Please don't auto-gen license for anything but an empty repo -- this is not something we want to misrepresent!

[fureigh]

On the subject of auto-generating a license for repos that are empty, though, a skeletal .about.yml file with the default license could be added to/as part of the instructions for creating 18f-init.

[mtorres253]

Let's turn this into a spike to generate the default license info for empty repos as @fureigh has suggested.

[melodykramer]

Did we ever add auto-generating an about_yml to the 18f-init as @fureigh suggested?

[mbland]

Not yet, and it's possible, but it'd require a little work. Right now 18f-init is just a shell alias. We'd probably want to make a proper script out of it, instruct people as to how to install it, include it in the laptop script and the (hopefully forthcoming) standard dev container.

[stvnrlly]

I've started that 18f init command over here: https://github.com/18F/18f-cli.