[oe] LICENSE field format

Denys Dmytriyenko denis at denix.org
Wed Oct 20 20:38:28 UTC 2010


All,

We've had a number of discussions on the license matter recently. Trying to 
unify those brings us to the question of the LICENSE field format in recipes. 
As some projects are dual/triple licensed or use multiple licenses at the same 
time, it becomes hard to specify it all in the LICENSE field, especially when 
there are no rules defined. We do have several different formats used to 
separate multiple licenses, which is quite confusing and doesn't make it clear 
whether licenses are AND-ed or OR-ed (I know those are not legal terms, but 
for the purpose of this discussion that's fine :)) Here are some examples:

LICENSE = "License1 License2"
LICENSE = "License1|License2"
LICENSE = "License1, License2"
LICENSE = "License1+License2"
LICENSE = "License1/License2"

LICENSE = "Very Long License Name"
LICENSE = "License with some exceptions"

To make matters worse, src_distribute.bbclass splits the field at spaces and 
creates directories for each token. So, for the last two examples above, we 
end up with 4 directories for every license - each word is a separate 
directory...

I'd like to raise this issue and start a discussion on unifying the LICENSE 
field format (and fixing src_distribute.bbclass accordingly). Would be nice to 
collect some ideas here on the maillist and/or discuss it further during OEDEM 
next week. Please feel free to comment.

-- 
Denys




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