[Sugar-devel] Full Licence field

[Walter Bender]

On Wed, Mar 18, 2009 at 4:44 PM, David Malcolm <dmalcolm at redhat.com> wrote:
>
> On Wed, 2009-03-18 at 16:00 -0400, Tom "spot" Callaway wrote:
>> On 03/18/2009 03:45 PM, Kevin Kofler wrote:
>> > Simon Schampijer wrote:
>> >> Yes. So the main question is now if Fedora would be willing to ship
>> >> general licenses under /usr/share/common-licenses, I think.
>>
>> I really don't want to do this. Here's why:
>>
>> A) Many copyright holders make minor modifications to the licensing
>> terms. These modifications usually do not affect the rights granted by
>> the license (which is why we do not mark them as distinct and individual
>> licenses), but it would be incorrect to have these packages pointing to
>> general license texts when those do not apply.
>>
>> B) Many licenses require that any distribution include the license text.
>> Red Hat Legal was very uncomfortable with us using a rpm dependency to
>> meet that requirement.
>>
>> What I do think we were looking at doing is having rpm mark %license
>> texts in a unique way that is different from %doc. This would permit rpm
>> --excludedocs but retain the license texts.
>>
> Thinking aloud, a couple of other approaches:
>  (i) Embed the SHA256 checksum of each license into the path e.g.:
> /usr/share/common-licenses/32b1062f7da84967e7019d01ab805935caa7ab7321a7ced0e30ebe75e5df1670/COPYING
> then have each file's identical implementation of those bytes overwrite
> each other, and you might have many packages owning that path on the
> installed system.  Slight modifications thus lead to different paths.
>
> That way you still have duplicates in the .rpm files, but an installed
> system has just one copy of each, and each rpm does indeed ship the
> precise license it's required to.
>
> I suspect that the arguments from crypto and from the legal side will
> "pass through one another like angry ghosts", though (and legal thus
> wins).

What a nice idea.

>  (ii) Compress the licenses?
>
>
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-- 
Walter Bender
Sugar Labs
http://www.sugarlabs.org