[Buildroot] Some legal-info observations/problems

[Luca Ceresoli <luca@lucaceresoli.net>]

Hi Thomas,

I ack all of your report. Just a few notes below.

Thomas De Schampheleire wrote:
> Luca, all,
>
> Let's try to summarize/conclude on these items...
>

...

>> 4. Suppose that a package has no license files and explicitly declares
>> this with FOO_LICENSE_FILES =
>> In this case, you will still get a warning: "cannot save license
>> (FOO_LICENSE_FILES not defined)", but in fact it is simply empty.
>> I think it would be better to distinghuish the situation 'empty' and
>> 'not defined'.
>
> Reading the various comments I have the impression there is a
> consensus to define a magic value for FOO_LICENSE_FILES, correct. The
> question is: which value(s). If we want to differentiate between:
> a. there is a license, it has a license text, but the text is not
> provided with the sources, and
> b. there is a license but there doesn't exist any license text,
> then we need two magic values.
>
> There were a few suggestions:
> N/A, none, NONE (ThomasP), which would cover (b)
> missing (rejected by ThomasP), not-provided, none-provided (ThomasDS),
> which would cover (a)

(a) is for cases when we are unable to extract the text, so what about 
"not-extracted"?

>
>
> In case of (a), I'm not sure if a warning is needed. It could for
> example be that the license is 'public domain' which doesn't need a
> license text.
> For (b) I think a warning is a good idea.
>
>
>
> Related to this is the question of a license URL. I personally think
> it is not legally safe to only refer to a URL from a package, because
> who knows someone changes the license text on the URL. They could just
> alter the license of existing sources.
> So although the feature of automatically downloading a license text
> from its URL looks nice, I (not a lawyer) would not recommend
> implementing it. I follow ThomasP's reasoning of requesting upstream
> to add the effective license text to the sources, and in the meantime
> using the magic value decided above for case (b).

I agree with you. Regarding the legal stuff we should stay on the safe 
side. But Arnout and Simon expressed an opposite opinion on another 
branch of this thread...

-- 
Luca