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Please add an explicit open-source license (MIT/Apache-2.0) #69

@JonOlsenCa

Description

@JonOlsenCa

Hi maintainers,

Thanks for assembling and curating this BPA ruleset — it's an excellent reference for Power BI semantic model quality, and it's saved a lot of repos a lot of broken refreshes.

I wanted to flag that the repository currently has no LICENSE file at the root, and gh api repos/TabularEditor/BestPracticeRules returns "license": null. In the absence of an explicit license, the default in many jurisdictions is "all rights reserved," which makes it legally ambiguous for downstream projects to vendor or re-port the rules.

I'm asking on behalf of an open-source-leaning project (Olsen Consulting / JO_PBIMCP) that has re-implemented a subset of these rules in pure Python, with explicit attribution to the TabularEditor source. We'd like to be unambiguously in the clear, both for our own re-port and for anyone else who's done similar work.

What would help

Adding either of these to the repository root would resolve the ambiguity:

  • MIT — most permissive; explicitly grants reuse, modification, and re-distribution with attribution. The standard for community rule libraries.
  • Apache-2.0 — adds patent-grant language; sometimes preferred for enterprise-adopter-heavy projects.

Either is fine — I have no preference, just looking for any explicit grant.

What we are doing in the meantime

  • We are not executing the Dynamic-LINQ rule expressions; every rule we use has been hand-ported to Python, with the upstream JSON file vendored only as metadata (rule IDs / names / descriptions / severities) and a SHA256-pinned audit hash.
  • Every Python rule cites its TabularEditor counterpart in attribution.
  • We are not redistributing the JSON as a standalone artefact.
  • We have a pre-promotion gate in our codebase that prevents the BPA validator from being default-on until this license question is resolved.

If you want to see the relevant context, the vendor posture is documented at: https://github.com/Olsen-Consulting/JO_PBIMCP/blob/main/core/bpa/vendor/VENDOR_INFO.md

Past similar requests

I checked open + closed issues and didn't find a prior license-clarification thread; happy to be pointed at one if I missed it.

Thanks for considering — totally understand if the answer is "we'll get to it" rather than a same-day fix. Even a one-line response in this thread granting permission would unblock our default-on promotion.

— Jonathan Olsen, Olsen Consulting

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