[oe] LICENSE field format

[Maupin, Chase]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: openembedded-devel-bounces at lists.openembedded.org
> [mailto:openembedded-devel-bounces at lists.openembedded.org] On Behalf Of
> Denys Dmytriyenko
> Sent: Wednesday, October 20, 2010 3:38 PM
> To: openembedded-devel at lists.openembedded.org
> Subject: [oe] LICENSE field format
> 
> 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"

I would vote for something along the following lines:

LICENSE = "License1|License2" 
	- This means the code is licensed under the terms of both licenses

LICENSE = "License1,License2"
	- This means the code can use either license exclusively

in the src_distribute class spaces should be replaced with "-"s.  Of course, this could lead to licenses like "GPLv3+-with-GCC-RLE".

We should avoid separating licenses with "/" because that will mess up the directory structure or "+" because that would be confusing when + is also used to mean "or later" for some licenses like the GPL.

> 
> 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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