Add proprietary-license URL type?

[jbicha]

I wrote an appstream file for Steam. I added <project_license>LicenseRef-proprietary</project_license> but I'd like to point to the actual license too.

What do you think about adding a proprietary-license URL type? GNOME Software could then use that URL to override the default License Proprietary > More information popup link.

On the other hand, it doesn't have to be a URL if there was a way I could include the license text directly.

[hughsie]

I think the idea here was to use LicenseRef-free=http://some-url.com -- does that work in gnome-software?

[jbicha]

Ok, I see that should work for Free Software, but what about Proprietary Software?

The GNOME Software solution is nice, but maybe this should really be done officially in appstream itself.

If there's enough of a demand for custom Free licenses, then maybe my proposed URL type could be custom-license with a note in the documentation that it's strongly discouraged for Free Software to use custom licenses.

[hughsie]

I think providing yet another way to specify a license is going to make it confusing for free software. I'd certainly accept a patch to add support for LicenseRef-Proprietary= making the URL a hyperlink in GNOME Software.

[ximion]

@hughsie Looks like SPDX doesn't have an explicit solution for this... But LicenseRef-Proprietary= would make sense to me.

Including the license text directly or having some kind of directive to include an external COPYING file into the data is opening a whole new can of worms, which I would like to avoid at least for now.

[cassidyjames]

For what it's worth, we're using the LicenseRef-proprietary=url in the store for Pop!_OS, as we saw a few FlatHub apps had picked up that convention.

https://github.com/flathub/com.spotify.Client/blob/bedf00b58c45208ffdb21c45475e4944a5e3e1ea/com.spotify.Client.appdata.xml#L8

https://github.com/flathub/com.visualstudio.code/blob/d7c9ff7a01a8033d4fb3be1302a8266ed7f83b0d/com.visualstudio.code.appdata.xml#L5