add basic wording for licensing and open the debate up to PRs.

[ghinks]

Issue 160 licensing

In order to get the ball rolling with some actual prose. This may serve as a starting point. I'm not making any recommendations either for or against individual licenses. Rather I'm saying that we
don't want

• restrictive
• patent

and do want

• the owner to have a license
• choose one appropriately

I think it is not likely we actually would come across a project we want to support that has no license.

[ljharb]

Could we determine the most used licenses on npm (by querying the license field in package.jsons in all packages), and report those statistics here? That would serve as a recommendation without making anyone worried that we were giving legal advice.

[ghinks]

I think that is an excellent idea. Let me see what data the NPM folks have on that. I have an owed favor.

[Eomm]

I would add also the note of the "license" field in package.json. Wdyt? 😁

[ljharb]

@ghinks if they can provide it readily, awesome - otherwise we can use @ChALkeR’s tool to just look at al the public packages.

@Eomm excellent idea; it should be present and valid SPDX.

[dominykas]

Do we recommend/discourage using a LICENSE file?

[ljharb]

Recommend, alongside the SPDX field. Both are required.

[ghinks]

Just an update. I have reached out to npm and got a response. I am continuing the conversation.

[ghinks]

( in order of popularity )

• MIT
• Apache
• BSD
• ISC
• SEE LICENSE
• MPL
• [object Object]
• GPL
• CC0-1.0
• LGPL
• Unlicense
• pemrouz.mit-license.org
• Artistic-2.0
• WTFPL
• AGPL

1. The license is literally "SEE LICENSE", i.e. it refers to a license.txt
2. [object Object] is again literally the license field when people put JS in it
3. "Unlicense" is "The Unlicense", not un-licensed code
4. The WTFPL really is that popular

[ljharb]

to clarify; [object Object] is when they use the antiquated object form of the field, which still, however, can be normalized to a license - unfortunately they didn't seem to apply that normalization.

[mcollina]

LGTM