[Sugar-devel] Full Licence field

[Sean DALY]

Questions like these are bread and butter for the SFC.


On Wed, Mar 18, 2009 at 10:24 PM, Walter Bender <walter.bender at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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
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