Shouldn't the new "copyright" field in tmsbuild.yaml be renamed "license"?

[JPeterMugaas]

The new copyright feild I see listed in some tmsbuild.yaml files does not list a copyright but rather a software license. There's a difference between the two.

For example, the copyright for TaurusTLS is "Copyright (c) 2025 TaurusTLS Developers. All Rights Reserved." The license for TaurusTLS is BSD licnsed or MPL 1.1 licensed as explained in the LICENSE.md file.

[agallero]

The new copyright feild

It is not new, it was there since v 0.0 🙂

There's a difference between the two.

I know. It is just that some of those projects don't have a clear copyright, so I wrote the license instead, which I guess makes more sense for open source projects. We probably should have 2 fields there, copyright and license, but well, the yaml has only one so that's the one I filled.

Remember that smartsetup was originally developed for our own products, which have a proprietary license, so when this was done it made no sense to have a "license" field (since the license is not something you can write on one line). Copyright for tms components makes sense, license not much.

For open source the situation reverts: There what matters is the license, because there isn't really a copyright unless contributors sign a CLA, so someone actually owns a copyright. In the taurus case, "TaurusTLS Developers" is kind of a tautology, same as "Vincent Parrett and contributors" in https://github.com/VSoftTechnologies/VSoft.CommandLineParser/tree/master/packages
It might as well say "Copyright: the people who wrote it" or "Copyright: everyone who ever made a pull request in this repo"

I don't know: at the moment I don't care much about that stuff, I care more about having it working. But it is indeed something to review. The possibilities I see are:

1. We remove the copyright line completely in the yaml. That info is elsewhere anyway, so having it repeated doesn't add much and might go out of synch with the real info. We currently don't use it anyway.
2. We add a new license field, and for tms products we don't include that line, and for open source products we don't include the copyright, if we don't care about it.

The main question is, are we planning to use that for anything? For open source products, it might make sense to list the license in tmsgui, so it might make sense to add a license field. But if we aren't planning to use it, then it is more (tedious) information to fill, which only makes it a little harder to create new tmsbuild.yaml for products

[JPeterMugaas]

I definitely would vote for a license field in the product listing. Sometimes, developers may want to avoid things that have certain licenses such as GNU GPL.

[wlandgraf]

I think there is no need to have a license info in the listing. Having duplicate information is a source of problem, we might display that the license is GPL (because it's in tmsbuild.yaml) but then the actual license in repo is MPL, because the author changed it and forgot to update tmsbuild.yaml.

I propose that if license is really important, we can add a "see license" option. User checks the license of the libraries they want, and at that point we go to the source and show the correct license without redundancy.