Index of /public/dataset/license-blobs/2024-12-06

Name	Last modified	Size

Parent Directory		-
blobs-earliest.csv.zst	2025-01-24 09:50	496M
blobs-fileinfo.csv.zst	2025-01-24 09:50	276M
blobs-nb-origins.csv.zst	2025-01-24 09:50	229M
blobs-origins.csv.zst	2025-01-24 09:50	382M
blobs-sample20k.tar.zst	2025-01-24 09:50	69M
blobs-scancode.csv.zst	2025-01-24 09:50	218M
blobs-scancode.ndjson.zst	2025-01-24 09:50	1.4G
blobs.csv.zst	2025-01-24 09:50	526M
blobs.tar.zst	2025-01-24 09:52	24G
README.md	2025-01-24 11:05	10K

Software Heritage — License Blob Dataset

Author: Stefano Zacchiroli
Contact: zack@upsilon.cc

Description

This dataset contains all “license files” extracted from a snapshot of the Software Heritage archive taken on 2024-12-06. (A long-term archival version of this dataset is also available from Zenodo).

In this context, a license file is a unique file content (or “blob”) that appeared in a software origin archived by Software Heritage as a file whose name is often used to ship licenses in software projects. Some name examples are: COPYING, LICENSE, NOTICE, COPYRIGHT, etc. The exact file name pattern used to select the blobs contained in the dataset can be found in the SQL query. Note that the file name was not expected to be at the project root, because project subdirectories can contain different licenses than the top-level one, and we wanted to include those too.

Format

The dataset is organized as follows:

blobs.tar.zst: a Zst-compressed tarball containing deduplicated license blobs, one per file. The tarball contains 10’951’035 blobs, for a total uncompressed size on disk of 122 GiB.

The blobs are organized in a sharded directory structure that contains files named like blobs/86/24/8624bcdae55baeef00cd11d5dfcfa60f68710a02, where:
- blobs/ is the root directory containing all license blobs
- 8624bcdae55baeef00cd11d5dfcfa60f68710a02 is the SHA1 checksum of a specific license blobs, a copy of the GPL3 license in this case. Each license blob is ultimately named with its SHA1:
```
$ head -n 3 blobs/86/24/8624bcdae55baeef00cd11d5dfcfa60f68710a02
                    GNU GENERAL PUBLIC LICENSE
                       Version 3, 29 June 2007

$ sha1sum blobs/86/24/8624bcdae55baeef00cd11d5dfcfa60f68710a02
8624bcdae55baeef00cd11d5dfcfa60f68710a02  blobs/86/24/8624bcdae55baeef00cd11d5dfcfa60f68710a02
```
- 86 and 24 are, respectively, the first and second group of two hex digits in the blob SHA1
blobs-sample20k.tar.zst: analogous to blobs.tar.zst, but containing “only” 20’000 randomly selected license blobs
license-blobs.csv.zst a Zst-compressed CSV index of all the blobs in the dataset. Each line in the index (except the first one, which contains column headers) describes a license blob and is in the format SWHID,SHA1,NAME, for example:
```
  swh:1:cnt:94a9ed024d3859793618152ea559a168bbcbb5e2,8624bcdae55baeef00cd11d5dfcfa60f68710a02,"COPYING"
  swh:1:cnt:94a9ed024d3859793618152ea559a168bbcbb5e2,8624bcdae55baeef00cd11d5dfcfa60f68710a02,"COPYING.GPL3"
  swh:1:cnt:94a9ed024d3859793618152ea559a168bbcbb5e2,8624bcdae55baeef00cd11d5dfcfa60f68710a02,"COPYING.GLP-3"
```
where:
- SWHID: the Software Heritage persistent identifier of the blob. It can be used to retrieve and cross-reference the license blob via the Software Heritage archive, e.g., at: https://archive.softwareheritage.org/swh:1:cnt:94a9ed024d3859793618152ea559a168bbcbb5e2
- SHA1: the blob SHA1, that can be used to cross-reference blobs in the blobs/ directory. May be empty in the rare case where the blob is not present in the archive (eg. because it was too large).
- NAME: a file name given to the license blob in a given software origin. As the same license blob can have different names in different contexts, the index contain multiple entries for the same blob with different names, as it is the case in the example above (yes, one of those has a typo in it, but it’s an original typo from some repository!).
blobs-fileinfo.csv.zst a Zst-compressed CSV mapping from blobs to basic file information in the format: sha1,mime_type,encoding,line_count,word_count,size, where:
- sha1: blob SHA1
- mime_type: blob MIME type, as detected by libmagic
- encoding: blob character encoding, as detected by libmagic
- line_count: number of lines in the blob (only for textual blobs with UTF8 encoding)
- word_count: number of words in the blob (only for textual blobs with UTF8 encoding)
- size: blob size in bytes
blobs-scancode.csv.zst a Zst-compressed CSV mapping from blobs to software license detected in them by ScanCode, in the format: sha1,license,score, where:
- sha1: blob SHA1
- license: license detected in the blob, as an SPDX identifier (or ScanCode identifier for non-SPDX-indexed licenses)
- score: confidence score in the result, as a decimal number between 0 and 100
There may be zero or arbitrarily many lines for each blob.
blobs-scancode.ndjson.zst a Zst-compressed line-delimited JSON, containing a superset of the information in blobs-scancode.csv.zst. Each line is a JSON dictionary with three keys:
- swhid: blob SWHID
- licenses: output of scancode.api.get_licenses(..., min_score=0)
- copyrights: output of scancode.api.get_copyrights(...)
There is exactly one line for each blob. licenses and copyrights keys are omitted for files not detected as plain text.
blobs-origins.csv.zst a Zst-compressed CSV mapping of where license blobs come from. Each line in the index associate a license blob to one of its origins in the format swhid,url, for example:
```
  swh:1:cnt:94a9ed024d3859793618152ea559a168bbcbb5e2,https://github.com/pombreda/Artemis
```
Note that a license blob can come from many different places, only an arbitrary (and somewhat random) one is listed in this mapping.

If no origin URL is found in the Software Heritage archive, then a blank is used instead. This happens when they were either being loaded when the dataset was generated, or the loader process crashed before completing the blob’s origin’s ingestion.
blobs-nb-origins.csv.zst a Zst-compressed CSV mapping of how many origins of this blob are known to Software Heritage. Each line in the index associate a license blob to this count in the format SWHID,NUMBER, for example:
```
  swh:1:cnt:94a9ed024d3859793618152ea559a168bbcbb5e2,2822260
```
blobs-earliest.csv.zst a Zst-compressed CSV mapping from blobs to information about their (earliest) known occurence(s) in the archive. Format: SWHID,EARLIEST_SWHID,EARLIEST_TS,OCCURRENCES, where:
- SWHID: blob SWHID
- EARLIEST_SWHID: SWHID of the earliest known commit containing the blob
- EARLIEST_TS: timestamp of the earliest known commit containing the blob, as a Unix time integer
- OCCURRENCES: number of known commits containing the blob
licenses-annotated-sample.tar.gz: ground truth, i.e., manually annotated random sample of license blobs, with details about the kind of information they contain.

Changes from the 2022-12-07 dataset

More input data, due to the SWH archive growing: more origins in supported forges and package managers; and support for more forges and package managers. See the SWH Archive Changelog for details.
32 contents referenced by directories but missing from the archive (eg. because they are too big) are now included in license-blobs.csv.zst (with an empty SHA1), blobs-origins.csv.zst, blobs-nb-origins.csv.zst, and blobs-earliest.csv.zst. They are not included in other files, as that would require access to their content.

Citation

If you use this dataset for research purposes, please acknowledge its use by citing the following paper:

[pdf, bib] Stefano Zacchiroli. A Large-scale Dataset of (Open Source) License Text Variants. In proceedings of the 2022 Mining Software Repositories Conference (MSR 2022). 23-24 May 2022 Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States. ACM 2022.

References

The dataset has been built using primarily the data sources described in the following papers:

[pdf, bib] Roberto Di Cosmo, Stefano Zacchiroli. Software Heritage: Why and How to Preserve Software Source Code. In Proceedings of iPRES 2017: 14th International Conference on Digital Preservation, Kyoto, Japan, 25-29 September 2017.
[pdf, bib] Antoine Pietri, Diomidis Spinellis, Stefano Zacchiroli. The Software Heritage Graph Dataset: Public software development under one roof. In proceedings of MSR 2019: The 16th International Conference on Mining Software Repositories, May 2019, Montreal, Canada. Pages 138-142, IEEE 2019.