Re: [gentoo-dev] Re: [RFC] Add operator + for licenses (EAPI-4 ?)

[David Leverton <levertond@googlemail.com>]

On Friday 04 September 2009 16:01:41 Rémi Cardona wrote:
> For instance, I'm still working on migrating all the X11 packages to the
> "MIT" license (mainly for cleaning purposes), but in fact, each and
> every package should have its own license file (like today) because the
> MIT license requires that we acknowledge all major contributions to the
> code. Therefore, using a template like ${PORTAGE}/licences/MIT does is
> probably not a good idea from a legal point of view.

Is that really a problem?  I admit to not being around for the original design 
decisions, but I would assume that the purpose of having LICENSE in ebuilds 
is to tell users what licence the package is under (whether or not it's 
accurate is a different matter), and the purpose of having the licences 
themselves in the tree is so that it's easy for users to look them up and 
decide whether they want to accept the conditions or not.  For that purpose, 
the exact list of credits is irrelevant.  Also, I'm not a lawyer, but I would 
think that the licence's requirement for credit is satisfied by the credits 
being included in the source code - it doesn't require acknowledgement when 
merely talking about the software or stating the fact that it's under a 
particular licence, just when distributing it.