I am looking at the license metadata from the licenses directory of
the liblicense-0.8.1 zip file. I'm wondering about the logic for
finding a license description. The metadata defines 376 licenses, and
only a few of them have "dc:description" elements. Those with
descriptions are the simple licenses ("by", "nc", "nd", "sa"). The
composite licenses (e.g. "by-nc-nd", "by-nc-sa", "by-nc", "by-nd-nc",
"by-nd", "by-sa", "nc-sa") do not contain definition elements.
Suppose I want to display an plain-English (or plain-French or plain-
Chinese or whatever locale my user requires) description of a "by-nc-
nd" license for a particular jurisdiction. I would start with the
most recent version of that license for the jurisdiction (2.5 in most
cases or 3.0 if the jurisdiction is the USA) and find that it does not
have a description. So do I then look for the three licenses ("by",
"nc" and "nd") and combine their descriptions to get the description
of "by-nc-nd"?
If the answer to the last question is "yes", here's a follow-up
question: It looks like the most recent general description of "by" is
3.0, but most (or all?) of the licenses for separate jurisdictions
have descriptions in version 2.5. Which should we use -- the
description for the preferred locale for the general 3.0 "by" license
or the description for the preferred locale for the specific
jurisdiction's 2.5 "by" license? For "nc" and "nd", do I use the 1.0
version unless the jurisdiction is "jp", in which case, do I use the
2.0 description?
The metadata in the license files seems to be silent on the question
of how to find an appropriate description unless it's included in the
license itself (or in a license referenced in an "isReplacedBy" tag or
a "source" tag). By that I mean that the metadata for version 3.0 of
the "by-nc-nd" license makes no reference to any prior versions or to
the "by", "nc" or "nd" licenses. That makes me wonder if the plain-
language description for a particular locale and jurisdition is
defined somewhere else?
Thanks for any suggestions.
Jim
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