[arch-dev-public] GPL v3

[Dan McGee]

On 7/12/07, Thomas Bächler <thomas at archlinux.org> wrote:
> Dan McGee schrieb:
> > Since some software we are going to package soon will be released
> > under GPL v3 instead of GPL v2 or later, should we add this license as
> > a separate one named "GPLv3" in the licenses package and begin using
> > this in the license field? This seems like the easiest solution to me,
> > rather than go back and change every occurrence of GPL to GPLv2.
> >
> > Thoughts? This isn't a very extreme change, but something that we need
> > to consider and I didn't want to make the change without a bit of
> > feedback first.
>
> I have some thoughts about licenses in archlinux in general:
>
> 1) makepkg should ensure that the license is either in the licenses
> package or shipped by the package itself. Otherwise, it should refuse to
> build the package or at least warn the user.
> This would also force us to make more strict rules about the location
> and filenames of licenses.

This might start to get complicated, that is for sure. I also dislike
making any additions to makepkg that are as Arch Linux specific as
this one would probably be. Although it sounds unbelievable, makepkg
is used by others too.

> 2) pacman should have a -Q --license option to view the license of a
> package.

pacman -Qi <package> | grep License | awk '{print $3 }'
gets the job done for me. Obviously not the prettiest, but this seems
like feature bloat to add this.

-Dan