Re: [gentoo-dev] cdrtools license issues

[Carsten Lohrke <carlo@gentoo.org>]

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On Friday 01 September 2006 20:26, Greg KH wrote:
> So we are just fine, one of the advantages of being a source-based
> distro :)

Um, rereading term three of the GPL, you're right of course. The question 
remains how do we flag this. LICENSE="GPL-2 CDDL-Schily" in case of 
cdrtools!? Yes, the latter is the license file we have in the tree and 
looking at it, the only difference to the CDDL is that it includes an 
additional notice, which sets the court to Berlin, Germany.

Also we need to have a file that lists clashing licenses, so Portage (at least 
in a future, caring about licenses) will trow warnings, when binary packages 
get build. I mean we claim to be a meta-distribution, but I don't think 
projects basing their binary distributions on Gentoo can feel safe a bit with 
regards to lisensing. We do absolutely nothing to care for that right now.


While thinking about it, other issues came to my mind:

- Ciaran pushed for not installing license/copyright information 
in /usr/share/doc/${PF}. But a lot of our licenses in /usr/portage/licenses 
list specific copyright holders - of a single package, others have a 
different copyright line of course. Wouldn't this be copyright infringement, 
to distrbute a images based on Gentoo, but do not include the correct 
licenses!?

- There is at least one case we can't map right now. Think about the 
following: An ebuild licensed GPL, depends on another one, licensed CPL. Both 
licenses are incompatible. It's impossible to distinct (within our 
LICENSE="foo" stuff), if the CPL licensed tool is only used to generate 
something at compile time and also used but not linked to at runtime, to the 
case the GPL licensed application links to a library, the CPL licensed ebuils 
provides. Again, binary distributions building on Gentoo are lost.
The package I have in mind is media-gfx/graphviz in this case.


Carsten

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