Re: LICENSE field format

[Denys Dmytriyenko <denis@denix.org>]

On Wed, Oct 20, 2010 at 11:17:29PM +0200, Frans Meulenbroeks wrote:
> 2010/10/20 Denys Dmytriyenko <denis@denix.org>:
> > 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"
> >
> > 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
> 
> What do others do?
> I know debian has a license file. (and actually that could probably be
> a good source of info to set our LICENSE field)

Debian uses "or" plus "and" keywords:

License: GPL-2+ or Artistic-2.0
License: GPL-2+ and BSD

Also, comma is used to change the priority of "or/and":

License: GPL-2+ or Artistic-2.0, and BSD

Licenses with spaces are allowed:

License: GPL-2+ with OpenSSL exception

And, BTW, "GPL version 2 or later" is specified as "GPL-2+". The format is 
detailed here:

http://dep.debian.net/deps/dep5/

I guess, we can try to adopt the "and/or" syntax...

-- 
Denys