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Naming conventions for OSS licenses

Sonatype uses a custom identifier for licenses discovered by Sonatype. This identifier is a combination of tags from the original license text such as the company name, package name, and type of license.

Sonatype license identifiers are of two types:

  1. Short name identifiers, limited to a max length of 50 characters

  2. Long name identifiers, limited to a max length of 200 characters

Short name identifiers

A short name identifier is a concatenated string of a series of tags.

[tag2]-[tag1]-[tag3]-variant-[tag4]

  1. [tag1]: camel case format of the license name

    1. Spaces and periods are replaced by hyphens while insignificant words and special characters are removed

    2. Existing abbreviated text will continue to be used

  2. A prefix [tag2] is added when [tag1] is not unique

    1. Prefix uses abbreviated company/name/author’s name

    2. Abbreviated names use uppercase (capital) letters, eg. Microsoft is MS

  3. A suffix [tag3] is added when [tag2]-[tag1] is not unique

    1. Uses the name of the component with the license

  4. The term "variant" is added after [tag3] when similar to an existing known license

  5. [tag4] is the release date (RD) in the format: RDmmddyyyy.

  6. The text "license agreement" is added unless exceeding the max length from above, in which LA is used.

Long name identifiers

Long name identifiers are descriptive license names limited to 200 characters. They may include any of these ASCII characters:

alphanumeric, punctuation, parentheses

Long names will not include other characters, lending, or trailing spaces