From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: Luca Ceresoli Date: Wed, 18 Apr 2012 17:39:09 +0200 Subject: [Buildroot] [RFC v2 16/31] linux: define license In-Reply-To: References: <1331153911-22277-1-git-send-email-luca@lucaceresoli.net> <4F8C8CE2.3000702@lucaceresoli.net> <201204162338.49807.yann.morin.1998@free.fr> Message-ID: <4F8EE01D.3000406@lucaceresoli.net> List-Id: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit To: buildroot@busybox.net Thomas De Schampheleire wrote: >>> I checked four packages in detail, and two of them have an unclear choice of >>> GPL version. I can't stand any more headache tonight, and I'm not sure I'll >>> have more luck with other packages. This is so frustrating... >> Not sure? Use 'unknown'. This can be refined at a later stage, if need be. >> >> A package with no license specified in the $(PKG)_LICENSE should default >> to 'unknown', to draw attention. >> >> IMNSHO, it is highly preferrable for the buildroot community to be >> conservative on this point, and in case there is ambiguity, default to >> 'unknown', and let a lawyer do his/her work. ;-) > Ideally, we'd try to make sure that the upstream developers clarify > their license so as to remove the ambiguity. I think it is of benefit > to no-one that such ambiguities exist. I agree with both of you. Getting things clarified from upstream is the best thing. When this is impossible, a deep legal analysis is far out of the goals of Buildroot. Still, there are cases of packages whose licensing policy is clear but not simple enough to fit into the narrow space of a csv file. See the case of tslib: the library and a few examples are LGPL, other examples are GPL. In this case we might declare TSLIB_LICENSE = GPL + LGPL, but this is not totally clear and not totally informative. So as Yann suggests it might be better to give up and default to an "unknown" license. Luca