[arch-general] License for libdrm packages

[mar77i at protonmail.ch]

‐‐‐‐‐‐‐ Original Message ‐‐‐‐‐‐‐
On Friday, May 24, 2019 12:14 AM, Lone_Wolf <lonewolf at xs4all.nl> wrote:

> People,
>
> I forgot to tell ashark the primary reason why I felt a thread in arch
> general ML was needed.
>
> Almost every file in libdrm tree has it's own copyright notice, I've
> listed 4 examples at the bottom of the mail.
>
> The COPYING file we include with libdrm doesn't list any of those 4
> notices and I have no idea how many more we miss.
>
> Are there tools to extract multiple license texts from multiple files in
> multiple folders, should maintainers create something by hand or are
> there other/better options ?
>
> How can we be sure we're not missing one or two copyright notices ?
>
> This could potentially affect many archlinux packages with numerous
> license types.
>

Well for one thing, you could try to work with upstream to extract the licenses into separate files somehow. RMS once explained to me that you might be out of luck if you don't reference your license in a source file of your project that uses your specified license, because in some jurisdictions people have successfully snuck out files from licensed projects where the file didn't mention the applicable license pro-actively. Which can be annoying because that means upstream would extract the license and replace it with a placeholder. So I guess the question is if the situation can even be fixed at all, or how we'd go about improve it.

cheers!
mar77i


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