[Sugar-devel] Full Licence field

[Simon Schampijer]

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.
> 
> ~spot

So, the point to ship a license per package is fine. I actually did not 
want to relax that. I had the technical problem to need to access the 
license field to be able to display it in a dialog inside Sugar.

http://shell.sugarlabs.org/~erikos/licence_field.png

And since - the file is placed in different places on each distro I 
wanted to see if a common place would be possible, makes sense. On 
Fedora this could have been in addition to the per package license 
field. Not very economic of course.

Anyhow - while thinking about it, I was not even sure the displaying of 
the full license is correct/needed - or matches the guidelines. For 
example I have not seen something similar in GNOME.

Maybe someone from Fedora that has more insights on those legal issues 
can comment what they want/need to see in such a page for Sugar on Fedora.

Thanks,
    Simon

PS: Of course, thanks for all the interesting comments about compressing 
the files etc to gain some space.