2007/4/15, Dan McGee
I don't know if this is a rehash of an old topic, but it hasn't come up in a while so I want to stir the pot. We need some standardization when it comes to licenses, which are still not in all of the official packages. (OpenSSH is missing one!)
Roman and I were discussing on IRC how the license array should look, and this example came up: license=('custom:BSD' 'custom:MIT' 'GPL')
A few issues to discuss with regard to this example: 1. A license like the GPL does not change its text depending on the package, while ones such as BSD and MIT do. Thus we definitely need to be including these customized licenses when we package these.
Just to add to Dan's words: sadly not all BSD/MIT/ZLIB/Python/ISC-licensed packages provide license text in a package.
2. For packages that have their own license (no other package will use it), do we use 'custom' or 'custom:packagename'?
IMO custom should be OK for everything except those listed in /usr/share/licenses/common.
3. For packages that use a BSD style license (and all other licenses like MIT), do we use the custom:prefix? Roman and I have differing opinions here. I think we should use the custom: prefix to indicate in pacman -Qi output that a license has been installed by the package and is not a common license already on the system. Roman thought that the custom: was unnecessary and looks ugly.
IMO custom: is redundant but then we should force packagers to provide license files for BSD/MIT/ZLIB/Python/ISC-licensed packages. 2 and 3 should be decided in the least confusing way.
Thoughts? I'd like to standardize this and get it on the wiki licenses page. http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Licenses
-- Roman Kyrylych (Роман Кирилич)