[arch-dev-public] License array format

Dan McGee dpmcgee at gmail.com
Sun Apr 15 15:15:42 EDT 2007


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.
2. For packages that have their own license (no other package will use
it), do we use 'custom' or 'custom:packagename'?
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.

Thoughts? I'd like to standardize this and get it on the wiki licenses
page. <http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Licenses>

-Dan




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