GSoC'18 with SPDX

The results for the GSoC 18 were announced yesteday and I am happy to state that I have been selected to work with SPDX on one of their projects Add a License XML Editor to the SPDX Online Tools. I would like to thank the mentors Mr. Gary O’Neall, Mr. Rohit Lodha and Mr. Philippe Ombredanne for their help and support.

Journey to GSoC

I did my first open source contribution during the Hacktoberfest’17 where I added a post about Python Strings to a repository related to Python Tips and Tricks. Then I attended Pycon India 2017 where I got to know about GSoC. I talked to previous GSoC interns and asked about their suggestions and experience.

After that, in January I started looking at the previous GSoC organizations and AboutCode was one of the orgs. that intrigued me. I setup the dev environment and started contributing.

I contributed for about a month then in Feburary the GSoC’18 organizations were announced and AboutCode was not selected. Our mentor Mr. Philippe Ombredanne, then suggested us two other organizations which were Coala and SPDX. I looked into the projects of each organizations and found the projects of SPDX to be more suitable for me and matching my skills.

I first understood what SPDX was then moved on to fixing bugs, suggesting new features and became the most active contributor in my project repository.

Then in March the proposal submission period started and I discussed the project with the mentors and went on to submit proposal for two projects out of which one was selected :)

About SPDX

Software Package Data Exchange (SPDX) is a standard format for communicating the components, licenses, and copyrights associated with software packages. If you’re developing open source software, or considering the use of some open source software, or have to investigate if software has acceptable licenses, SPDX may help. SPDX is easy to use for common cases, and SPDX makes it easy for all software recipients to know what they’re allowed to do (and not do). SPDX was created by, and is maintained by, the Linux Foundation.

About the Project

All the licenses for the SPDX License List are stored in the license-list-XML repository in the XML format. So creating or editing a license in XML format is a manual process and requires the editing of XML files by the SPDX team members. This can be challenging for the person who wants to contribute but is not familiar with XML and can sometimes be tedious.

The aim of this project is to create a web based XML editor using which anyone can create and edit the license XML files, download the new edited XML file and can create a pull request in the license-list-XML repository to get his changes merged.

Future Plans

I am looking forward to have a great summer with SPDX, learn a lot of things, communicating with great people and completing my project successfully.

Feel free to contact for any queries regarding GSoC, i’ll be happy to answer them all.