LicenseExpression

Summary

An SPDX Element containing an SPDX license expression string.

Description

Often a single license can be used to represent the licensing terms of a source code or binary file, but there are situations where a single license identifier is not sufficient. A common example is when software is offered under a choice of one or more licenses (e.g., GPL-2.0-only OR BSD-3-Clause). Another example is when a set of licenses is needed to represent a binary program constructed by compiling and linking two (or more) different source files each governed by different licenses (e.g., LGPL-2.1-only AND BSD-3-Clause).

SPDX License Expressions provide a way for one to construct expressions that more accurately represent the licensing terms typically found in open source software source code. A license expression could be a single license identifier found on the SPDX License List; a user defined license reference denoted by the LicenseRef-idString; a license identifier combined with an SPDX exception; or some combination of license identifiers, license references and exceptions constructed using a small set of defined operators (e.g., AND, OR, WITH and +). We provide the definition of what constitutes a valid an SPDX License Expression in this section.

Metadata

https://rdf.spdx.org/v3/SimpleLicensing/LicenseExpression

Name	LicenseExpression
Instantiability	Concrete
SubclassOf	AnyLicenseInfo

Properties

Property	Type	minCount	maxCount
customIdToUri	/Core/DictionaryEntry	0	*
licenseExpression	xsd:string	1	1
licenseListVersion	/Core/SemVer	0	1