Hi all,
being part of Commons Conservancy brought up yet another subject,
which is whether we should add a header with license information in
every file in the projects under idpy. This is not something done in
an abstract way, there is a specific format modelling this information
(see https://spdx.org/ and https://reuse.software/ - more specifically
https://reuse.software/practices/2.0/) Still, I find it problematic.
We want to open up the question to the wider community and consider
their thoughts on this. The forwarded message below is discussing this
subject. You can see the question we posed, the answer we got and my
comments. Feel free to tell us what you think on this.
---------- Forwarded message ---------
Date: Thu, 16 May 2019 at 09:56
> ---------- Forwarded message ----------
> Date: May 8, 2019, 8:15 AM -0700
>
> > Why does CC think having a single license file per project is
> > insufficient? Our thought is that if we can avoid adding a header to
> > every single file, that would be nice, esp. given we already have this
> > info in the license file and we have the Note Well.
>
>
> this is not just our opinion, but something that is an industry and
> community standard for legal compliance these days. When companies like
> Siemens, Samsung or Honeywell use some code in one of the hundreds or
> thousands of devices and systems in their product line, they need to be
> able to provide the correct license and a download of the exact version.
> This means machine readability too.
>
I've actually observed the opposite of that. Communities abandon the
"license in every file" model, and just use a single LICENSE file in
the root of the project. The LICENSE file contains license
information, that is, it is not a single license but it has exception
sections and so on.
> To quote from https://reuse.software/practices/2.0/ :
>
> Scroll to the section "2. Include a copyright notice and license in each
> file"...
>
> "Source code files are often reused across multiple projects, taken from
> their origin and repurposed, or otherwise end up in repositories where
> they are separate from its origin. You should therefore ensure that all
> files in your project have a comment header that convey that file’s
> copyright and license information: Who are the copyright holders and
> under which license(s) do they release the file?
>
Continuing from above, the standardization of package-management
formats and tools has helped exactly with that: to avoid distribution
of single files, and instead provide packages and modules. It is bad
practice and considered a hack to copy files. Nobody liked that model
and everyone is moving away; it is unstructured, it becomes
unmanageable and it will cause problems.
> It is highly recommended that you keep the format of these headers
> consistent across your files. It is important, however, that you do not
> remove any information from headers in files of which you are not the
> sole author.
>
> You must convey the license information of your source code file in a
> standardised way, so that computers can interpret it. You can do this
> with an SPDX-License-Identifier tag followed by an SPDX expression
> defined by the SPDX specifications."
>
> (the text goes on for a while after this, to clarify the point but this
> is the basic gist of it)
>
> There is a nice Python tool to check:
>
> https://github.com/fsfe/reuse-tool
>
> I hope this makes sense
>
Well, it does not make complete sense. We're talking about licensing a
project. A project is not just code; there are data files (html, xml,
yaml, json files), binary files (archives/zip, images, audio, video,
etc), text files (configs, ini-files, etc) all "not-code". How do you
mark those files? Does the LICENSE file need a license-header? The
json format does not define comments, how do you add a header there?
If a binary file does not get a license header, why should a file with
code get one?
I would expect there to be a way to have the needed information
unified. If the files themselves cannot provide this information it
has to be external; thus the LICENSE file. If someone is worried about
somebody else re-using single files that do not have license
information (a python file, a png image, etc) there is really nothing
you can do (the DRM industry has been trying to solve for a long time;
and still your best bet is "social DRM").
Since, we're developing on open source with a permissive license, even
if someone does that, should we be happy that someone is actually
using what we built or sad that the files they copied did not have a
license header? And if they include the license information of that
copied file in their project's LICENSE file, is this solved?
Having pointed these contradictions, I am thinking that the "license
in every file" model seems to be a step backwards. It is introducing
overhead and does not really solve the problem, while at the same time
it enables a culture of bad practice (copying files around).
Cheers,
--
Ivan c00kiemon5ter Kanakarakis >:3
Hi Leif,
I added 2 pipes to buildin.py:
- publish_html creates static HTML views of IDPs and SPs, using XSLT based on Peter Schober’s alternative to MET;
- publish_split: similar to store, but added validUntil and creates signed XML-file per EntityDescriptor. This can be consumed dynamically by ADFS in an IDP role.
I put it directly into buildin.py because it shares some code with the sign pipe. Is this viable from your PoV - if yes, I would make an PR.
Cheers, Rainer
Hey,
Sorry for the crosspost...
After a few weeks of spending all of my available development bits on
the various parts of RA21 (cf github.com/TheIdentitySelector, yes its
all nodejs!) I'm back to working on pyFF for a bit.
Here is what I have planned for in the quite near term:
1. merge the api-refactory branch which includes a pyramids-based API
2. merge documentation PR from Hannah Sebuliba (thx!)
3. tag and release the last monolothic version of pyFF
4. in HEAD which becomes the new 1.0.0 release:
- remove all frontend bits (old discovery, management web app)
- pyffd will now start pyramids-based API server
- wsgi will be available/recommended
- create a new "frontend app" as a separate webpack+nodejs project
- create docker-compose.yaml that starts pyffd (API) + frontend app
5. tag and release 1.0.0 thereby moving pyFF over to semantic versioning
After 4 it makes sense to talk about things like...
- new redis/#nosql backends
- work on reducing memory footprint
- pubsub for notifications between MDQ servers
- more instrumentation & monitoring
- adaptive aggregation for large-scale deployments
- elastic search
- management APIs for integrated editing of local metadata
- OIDC
- generating offline MDQ directory structures (cf scripts/mirror-mdq.sh)
Thoughts etc are as usual welcome.
Cheers Leif
You probably saw this on the REFEDS mailing list, but just in case...
>
> **Please share among your (human) networks!**
>
> The R&E community, from the scholarly information world to research communities to universities, all depend on digital identity and trust models. Come join us to work on the code that will grow the capabilities in the trust and identity arena at the first T&I Hackathon, offered in conjunction with the NORDUnet Technical Workshop and brought to you by REFEDS, Identity Python, and NORDUnet.
>
> As with any Hackathon, this is about developers. It is not a day of tutorials and sessions - it’s about code. Do you have ideas for Identity Discovery? Join the seamlessaccess.org <http://seamlessaccess.org/> table to work on thiss.io <http://thiss.io/>. Do you have an idea for a new Satosa microservice? Join the Satosa developers table. Do you have some other idea for integrating new functionality to support assurance levels? Strong authentication? Come with your ideas and set up a table to start the work! Ideas are already being recorded on the REFEDS wiki: https://wiki.refeds.org/x/AwauAg <https://wiki.refeds.org/x/AwauAg>.
>
> Registration for the Hackathon is part of the overall NORDUnet Technical Workshop (http://www.ntw2019.net <http://www.ntw2019.net/>). The NORDUnet Technical Workshop (NTW) is is held every two years in Copenhagen. The main event (24-26 September 2019) features a series of workshops on subjects related to research and education networks, including a full day of trust & identity workshops. The NTW brings together 150-200 practitioners from research and education networking communities in the Nordic countries and beyond. The event is held a 5-minute metro ride from Copenhagen airport, 10 minutes from central Copenhagen.
>
> We look forward to seeing you there!
>
> Heather Flanagan, REFEDS coordinator
Hi!
Since we haven’t even begun the work on building a front-end based on JWTConnect-Python to Satosa I guess the
chance that we have something working before TNC19 is very slim indeed.
Is there any documentation anywhere on what to think about when building a new front-end ?
Or should I just use the front-end based on pyop as a pattern ?
— Roland
The higher up you go, the more mistakes you are allowed. Right at the top, if you make enough of them, it's considered to be your style.
-Fred Astaire, dancer, actor, singer, musician, and choreographer (10 May 1899-1987)
