Hi

> It's not simple. You have to learn the requirements of each license
> and see if and how they allow themselves to be combined. There are
> businesses doing exactly that. If you want to DIY I think you just
> have to start by reading the licenses. You may or may not want an
> IP lawyer sitting beside you while doing it.

This is the kind of unhelpful answer that I can find plenty of examples 
of through google...

Consider that all software comes with some kind of licence.  Generally 
if you ask a non opensource company about licensing costs then even the 
sales droid can help you out. I do find it quite baffling that on 
average if you question an opensource user then their answer on 
licensing is that one should redirect the question to one of the most 
expensive and opaque professions on earth...  If your mate gave you that 
answer in the pub when you asked what price for a beer you would 
immediately cotton on that they don't really know and are bluffing...

The bit people seem to miss is that legal documents are for forcing 
arbitration in the event of dispute - in the meantime people are 
supposed to rub along in a cooperative manner.  That many OSS advocates 
seem to feel that employing expensive lawyers is the only way to talk to 
them shows that they are probably missing the bigger picture...

On a more constructive note: I think I do understand the key terms of 
the main software licences we use, from my understanding they are not 
all that onerous.  So can we perhaps move this topic onto tips, 
suggestions and practical matters about moving forward?  I'm not sure 
that one of the most expensive type of lawyers is best employed talking 
scripting tips?

> If you have patches which use a different license than the package
> they modify then you have more work to do. Portage doesn't help here.
> A good start would be to add record of all patches applied by emerge.
> Indeed add it into the epatch command.

OK, so this is what I asked the list.  Please don't turn it back at me...

Firstly can we not assume that the patches in gentoo *are* in 
compliance, otherwise gentoo's various packaged binaries would cause 
Gentoo to be out of compliance?  (I'm going to assume that human error 
will cause at least some mistakes, but lets hope that just like Gentoo 
isn't being sued right now, copyright holders are actually going to be 
cooperative in fixing minor issues...!)


So, back to the problem: one of the bigger challenges seems to be how to 
actually capture the absolute list of patches applied?  Any 
suggestions?  I already suggested creating my own "patch" utility which 
saves it's input - seems ugly - other suggestions?

I'm not using catalyst.  Any tips from others on capturing, presenting, 
managing and deploying GPL code?

Hoping for useful answers here rather than "talk to some really 
expensive professional who knows nothing about programming".

Gentoo seems very attractive for building embedded system - however, 
there seem to be some missing steps to help with deployment.  I thought 
that was ontopic for this list?  Any tips from others who are building 
things?


Cheers

Ed W