[Sugar-devel] Full Licence field

[Simon Schampijer]

Kevin Kofler wrote:
> Simon Schampijer wrote:
>> 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.
> 
> FWIW, KDE does exactly that.
> 
> /usr/share/kde4/apps/LICENSES/ (where /usr/share/kde4/apps is the KDE 4
> application data directory, it can vary from distribution to distribution)
> contains the following files (owned by kdelibs):
> ARTISTIC  BSD       GPL_V2    GPL_V3    LGPL_V2   LGPL_V3   QPL_V1.0
> The KAboutData class in kdelibs provides an enum which allows you to pick
> one of these licenses. If the license is not one of those, the application
> is responsible for loading the exact text of the license explicitly.
> 
>> 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.
> 
> KDE does it. (Try "Help / About (application name)" in a KDE application.
> The name of the license is a link, clicking that link opens a dialog box
> with the full text of the license.)
> 
> It's not a bad idea, but it isn't strictly needed either. (There are plenty
> of GPLed applications which don't display the full text of the GPL in the
> UI.)
> 
>         Kevin Kofler

Ok, I have placed it now to the sugar data dir so it is accessible on 
each platform/distribution the same way. As Sugar is likely getting into 
areas where people are not that familiar with open source software it is 
maybe a good thing to strengthen it out in the UI as well. I think that 
was part of the idea behind it when done by OLPC.

Thanks for your thoughts,
    Simon