scripts: check every operand of an OR license expression #2307

pull FlashWayne wants to merge 1 commits into bitcoin:master from FlashWayne:buildtable-license-or changing 1 files +5 −3

FlashWayne commented at 12:06 PM on September 25, 2026: none

The License / License-Code check in buildtable.pl does $val =~ s/ OR .*//, so only the first license in an SPDX OR expression is checked. That has two effects:

License: GPL-2.0 OR MIT fails with "Unacceptable license GPL-2.0", although BIP-3 allows any expression that is "L" or equivalent to "L OR E" for an acceptable L. Order shouldn't matter.
License: MIT OR Bogus-License passes, because the second identifier is never looked at.

This splits the value on OR, requires every operand to be in %DefinedLicenses, and requires at least one operand to be acceptable (or grandfathered PD / CC-BY-SA-4.0 for the BIPs listed). Results with a temporarily edited header on bip-0341:

License	before	after
`BSD-3-Clause`	ok	ok
`GPL-2.0 OR MIT`	Unacceptable license GPL-2.0	ok
`MIT OR Bogus-License`	ok	Undefined license Bogus-License
`GPL-2.0 OR AGPL-3.0`	Unacceptable	Unacceptable
`CC0-1.0 OR MIT OR Apache-2.0`	ok	ok

The script still runs cleanly over the whole repo, and diffcheck.sh has no changes.

scripts: check every operand of an OR license expression

buildtable.pl dropped everything after the first " OR " in License and
License-Code, so only the first license was looked at. "GPL-2.0 OR MIT"
was rejected as unacceptable even though BIP-3 accepts any expression
equivalent to "L OR E" with an acceptable L, and "MIT OR Foo" passed
without Foo being a known license.

Require every operand to be a defined license, and at least one of them
to be acceptable (or grandfathered for that BIP).

e66162da68

in scripts/buildtable.pl:198 in e66162da68

 191 | @@ -192,10 +192,12 @@
 192 |  			$layer = $val;
 193 |  		} elsif ($field =~ /^License(?:\-Code)?$/) {
 194 |  			die "License continued across lines in $fn, use SPDX expression (... OR $val) instead" if $continuation;
 195 | -			$val =~ s/ OR .*//;
 196 | -			die "Undefined license $val in $fn" unless exists $DefinedLicenses{$val};
 197 | +			my @licenses = split / OR /, $val;
 198 | +			for my $license (@licenses) {
 199 | +				die "Undefined license $license in $fn" unless exists $DefinedLicenses{$license};
 200 | +			}

murchandamus commented at 2:13 PM on September 25, 2026:

This does not match the requirements of BIP3. BIPs must be made available under at least one acceptable license, but may be licensed additionally under other terms. We prefer that the acceptable license is positioned first, hence the existing check.

murchandamus added the label CI on Sep 25, 2026
murchandamus commented at 2:14 PM on September 25, 2026: member

Thanks for the submission, but I don’t think this change is necessary.
murchandamus closed this on Sep 25, 2026
FlashWayne deleted the branch on Sep 25, 2026

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