OQ24. Should there be multiple licenses, for data, for software and for documentation if all of them reside in the same repository?

[priya-gitTest]

[rebeccaringuette]

This effort is for research software, not data, so I would vote to exclude data licenses from this discussion.
The concept of assigning a license for metadata separately for the item the metadata describes, in this case software, is a new one. Not even DataCite has a way to indicate a license for the metadata, so some additions to DataCite and related metadata infrastructures would be needed before this becomes measurable. Schema.org does have a way to do this, though. In schema.org, you indicate information about the metadata record in the subjectOf field (see the Science-on-Schema.org standard for datasets as an example):

"license": "https://spdx.org/licenses/BSD-2-Clause",
"subjectOf": {
      "@type": "DataDownload",
      "contentUrl": "https://drive.google.com/file/d/1DaMUZunS3aYH0KFgFGwD5saOsJXap6ye/view?usp=sharing",
      "dateModified": "2025-03-05T12:34:56",
      "description": "HSSI metadata describing the software",
      "encodingFormat": "application/json",
      "license": "https://spdx.org/licenses/CC0-1.0.html",
      "name": "HSSI metadata for the software"
},

Note the field "license" under "subjectOf" indicates the license for the metadata, which in this case is the CC0 license, and is different from the software license in the "license" field (included for comparison). I should also note here that when no license is indicated separately for the metadata, it in understood that the same license indicated for the item (software in this case) applies to the metadata.
The licenses do not need to reside in the same repository (e.g. SPDX), but at the minimum information for each license (e.g. the URL to the license information) should be included for each one.
According to CodeMeta, documentation is usually indicated in the "codemeta:buildInstructions" term. Since documentation typically resides in the same repository as the code, the same license applies to the documentation.
Any other thoughts?

[priya-gitTest]

I saw this repository today and wondered if we have use cases for Multiple Licences for a software and if this is more common or an exception. https://github.com/spack/spack

[priya-gitTest]

This effort is for research software, not data, so I would vote to exclude data licenses from this discussion. The concept of assigning a license for metadata separately for the item the metadata describes, in this case software, is a new one. Not even DataCite has a way to indicate a license for the metadata, so some additions to DataCite and related metadata infrastructures would be needed before this becomes measurable. Schema.org does have a way to do this, though. In schema.org, you indicate information about the metadata record in the subjectOf field (see the Science-on-Schema.org standard for datasets as an example):

"license": "https://spdx.org/licenses/BSD-2-Clause",
"subjectOf": {
      "@type": "DataDownload",
      "contentUrl": "https://drive.google.com/file/d/1DaMUZunS3aYH0KFgFGwD5saOsJXap6ye/view?usp=sharing",
      "dateModified": "2025-03-05T12:34:56",
      "description": "HSSI metadata describing the software",
      "encodingFormat": "application/json",
      "license": "https://spdx.org/licenses/CC0-1.0.html",
      "name": "HSSI metadata for the software"
},

Note the field "license" under "subjectOf" indicates the license for the metadata, which in this case is the CC0 license, and is different from the software license in the "license" field (included for comparison). I should also note here that when no license is indicated separately for the metadata, it in understood that the same license indicated for the item (software in this case) applies to the metadata. The licenses do not need to reside in the same repository (e.g. SPDX), but at the minimum information for each license (e.g. the URL to the license information) should be included for each one. According to CodeMeta, documentation is usually indicated in the "codemeta:buildInstructions" term. Since documentation typically resides in the same repository as the code, the same license applies to the documentation. Any other thoughts?

I would research on what elements of a typical software in an open source repository are license-ble. So when we talk about documentation, and I also assumed in some cases data( to be excluded for now), metadata license etc. we need to make some inventory around this then.

[rebeccaringuette]

I've never seen two licenses before. Maybe someone could use the GitHub API to search for repositories with more than one license, assuming that is possible?
@dgarijo @andrew

[andrew]

Another example: https://github.com/github/docs (MIT and Creative Commons)

More details on how GH implements it here: https://github.blog/changelog/2022-05-26-easily-discover-and-navigate-to-multiple-licenses-in-repositories/

Although in the high level api, github only shows one license for the repo: https://api.github.com/repos/github/docs

[andrew]

Protocol labs also dual licenses most of their software as both MIT and Apache: https://github.com/ipfs/kubo

I believe the reason is that apache license has explicit patent protection (not compatible with GPLv2), for users who need that, while MIT does not and is widely compatible.

[priya-gitTest]

Found this interesting paper From Hugging Face to GitHub: Tracing License Drift in the
Open-Source AI Ecosystem