Re: [gentoo-dev] Re: Installing COPYING or LICENSE files

[Harald van Dijk]

On Tue, Dec 27, 2005 at 12:32:25PM +0200, Petteri Räty wrote:
> Harald van Dijk wrote:
> > On Tue, Dec 27, 2005 at 01:01:10AM -0600, R Hill wrote:
> >
> >>>Removing these files and relying on LICENSE=foo in the ebuild could be seen as
> >>>a copyright violation. There are lots of samples in /usr/src/licenses that
> >>>aren't generic, but include a copyright notice naming the authors of a
> >>>particular piece of software, but it doesn't match with all packages under
> >>>this license of course. Take ZLIB as example. Since I'm not a lawyer I might
> >>>be wrong, but me thinks it would make sense to ask one.
> >>
> >>AFAIK most licenses need to be included with the distribution of the source, not
> >>installed on the system after compilation.  But I could be wrong too.
> >
> >
> > There are exceptions, a popular one being BSD.
> >
> >     * Redistributions in binary form must reproduce the above copyright
> >     * notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer in the
> >     * documentation and/or other materials provided with the distribution.
> >
> > As a quick example, iputils is BSD-licensed and does not install or
> > reproduce its license, so does this cause problems for iputils binpkgs?
>
> We are not redistributing anything in binary form when installing
> programs.

Of course, but we are redistributing programs in binary form in exactly
the same state as when installing them, via stages and live/packagecds.

> If the license should be
> installed, shouldn't the upstream make install take care of it then?

iputils doesn't do a make install, and if it did, it would still be
reasonable if that didn't copy the license, since the users who run that
themselves don't need it.