Option to highlight and count files with no license information

[lucian-balea]

Description

Currently files with no license information are marked in grey and the status is overridden in green at aggregation. Additionally these files are not included in the counting.

Could an option be added at import to include such files in the counting and mark as not green at aggregation?
Note: changing manually the status of these files to "Do be discussed" provides expected result.

Steps followed and expected result

In some situations, no clearing of files with no license information can be an issue, e.g.:

• image, sound or video assets requiring an attribution
• files with headers like

/* Copyright (c) 2020, XYZ (http://www.xyz.com)
 *
 * All rights reserved
 *
 */

that are not differentiated from files with the following headers in the copyright tab :

/* Copyright (c) 2020, XYZ (http://www.xyz.com)
 *
 * SPDX-License-Identifier: MPL-2.0
 */

Test case illustrating the second issue above:
test_headers.zip

Currently in the license browser tab (no red dot while one file as the "All rights reserved" header above):

And in the copyright tab (not highlighting the file with "All rights reserved" header):

Desired behavior (obtained changing manually the status of the file to "Do be discussed"):

[GMishx]

Hello @lucian-balea ,

Does the feature provided in #1713 be helpful for your case? (Exporting copyright list with filter "No license")

[NicolasToussaint]

@lucian-balea, the red light means "there is license information in that file that has not been reviewed", not "there is a problem with the license of that file".

A few ideas:

1. Maybe we could have another colour than green, for the "No license found" status, and the folders that contain at least 1 such file. Maybe blue ?
2. What you need is close to a REUSE validation, see Integrate REUSE standard #1592
3. On the same idea as @GMishx's we have an CSV export feature not yet shared with the community that export these fields, we plan to share it.

FileName	SPDXID	LicenseConcluded	LicenseComment	LicenseInfoInFile	FileCopyrightText

And concerning the colour of the folder, there is also #1494 about marking folders "To be discussed" (yellow) rather then green when it contains "To be discussed" files.

[lucian-balea]

Hello!

@GMishx , the feature in #1713 partially helps indeed, especially for the second case (files with copyright header and no license). Thanks for pointing it out!

Having the option to clear the "no license found" status would still be a nice to have for assets such as images, sounds, etc.

@NicolasToussaint , another color than red, green or grey for uncleared files with no license would be a good option indeed. It would also be helpful to have these files included in the count when aggregating at folder level.
And automatic clearing based on REUSE standard also seems a nice feature to me (although probably more ambitious to implement).

[NicolasToussaint]

We do have the need to make sure that every scanned file has license information inside (or next to it).

Indeed, when publishing work, or even distributing source code under a proprietary license, all files should be appropriately tagged, and this is hard to ensure with Fossology today.

What do you think of the following scheme:

1. In column Files Cleared, add a 3rd number with the total number of files.
   So we would have Number of cleared files/Number of files containing licensing information/Total number of files
   
2. Change the colour of the Clearing Status when all files with licensing information have been cleared, but some files without licensing information remain.
3. For files that cannot be modified to inject compliance info (like binary files), see proposition in Detect 'foobar.license' files, as part of RESUE.Software standard #1833

As for the new colour, I would propose Blue: it is still close to Green, and also means that there is nothing more to be done within Fossology (compliance information has to be added to the project, and the project rescanned)

If it sounds good, we could start working on this soon.

[lucian-balea]

Hello!
The 3 proposals above would be great features for us as well.

Regarding 2, I would say that the blue color would apply when all files with licensing information have been cleared, but some files without licensing information remain and they have not been marked as irrelevant.
The project may indeed include files that do not need license information so they can be cleared. Then the tool would easily spot new files without license which need attention.

[NicolasToussaint]

Thanks @lucian-balea ,

Good thinking here, the Blue / Green scheme sounds perfect to me.

[NicolasToussaint]

On this Issue, topics #.1 and #.3 have been developed, #.2 remains To Do