[arch-general] License for libdrm packages

mar77i at protonmail.ch mar77i at protonmail.ch
Thu May 23 22:21:53 UTC 2019


> I have read that article in ArchWiki. I understand that point that MIT
> licences are all custom because of individual copyright line. But then I do
> not understand when should I use license=('MIT') instead of license=('custom')?

> I have read that MIT is a set of licenses, but it is kinda unclear. I guess
> that if there is clear text that it is a MIT license, then I use MIT,
> otherwise for MIT-style licence I just use custom. Am I correct?

> It's possible I misunderstood what part of this process caused confusion with
> you, so please elaborate your position further, I'll gladly answer or research
> more questions.

To answer my own question, of course I screwed it up already.
Okay, so license=('custom:MIT'), license=('MIT') or license=('custom')?

manual says: put licenses from /usr/share/licenses/common into the license
array, otherwise use 'custom' / 'custom:LicenseName'.

Depending on how many PKGBUILDs you've looked at in the past, you might think,
of course, you put license=('MIT') for MIT licensed projects in your PKGBUILD.
Which, as we now established, is incorrect, yet not actually enforced, and the
more important part of getting this right is to have the original license file
with the copyright notice in the package, as the document usually asks.

I think we can bikeshed over the prefered 'custom' or 'custom:MIT' details from
here on, however, a quick glance at my pacman database shows that a lot of repo
packages actually don't do what the manpage say, of which there are asp,
wayland, sdl2... (the list goes on).

cheers!
mar77i

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