[oe] [RFC] LICENSE fields and packages

[Marcin Juszkiewicz]

Tuesday 25 of November 2008 22:02:00 Koen Kooi napisał(a):

> How would a non-OE user know that http://openembedded.org/dl/ICA2.txt
> is the license? Shipping the license itself in the packages would be
> better, but that will need a lot of thought, 

> since we can't have a 1000 packages shipping 
> /usr/share/licenses/GPLv2, and *all* packages from a recipe need a
> license, even -doc, -dev -and -dbg.

/usr/share/common-licenses/ is part of base-files-doc now and consists 
GPL, LGPL, BSD, Artistic and few other licenses. We can extend this list 
and create 'common-licenses' package which would be installed in each 
image.

> The concrete problem I have is that I have a bunch of licenses that
> don't have a name (not even inside the company that wrote them), so
> my recipes have things like
>
> LICENSE = "proprietary binary"
> LICENSE = "evil binary"

So add license.txt into /usr/share/doc/${PN}/ with content of that 
package license. I have done few such packages during last year as some 
copyright holders gave permissions to distribute their stuff *ONLY* with 
attached license. This kind of stuff does not even need nothing new - it 
is just another file in SRC_URI.

> So as short term solution I'd like to be able to point to a url for
> the 'licenses without a proper name' 

Yeah.. especially when license contents is available only in restricted 
area for which simple person can not get access (for example Marvell 
extranet). If there are packages which have own license then such 
license should be inside of package.

Regards, 
-- 
JID:      hrw at jabber.org
Website:  http://blog.haerwu.biz/
LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/marcinjuszkiewicz