On 23/06/2004, at 12:01 AM, Nicolas Mailhot wrote:
Le mar, 22/06/2004 à 09:37 -0400, Matthew Miller a écrit :On Tue, Jun 22, 2004 at 08:47:53AM +0200, Arjan van de Ven wrote:Very good point. I'll add that. Is there a Proper way to specify multipleusually I do something like "parts GPL parts IPL" or so
licenses in the license tag? "GPL and IPL", I guess? (As opposed to
"GPL/IPL" -- that'd be for dual-licensed, right? So annoying that IBM didn't
chose to just GPL this.)
Hmmm; maybe even "IPL (OpenAFS) and GPL (kernel headers)" or "IPL; kernel
build trees GPL".
Or even better two different packages with clearly defined licenses (with the IPL part depending on the GPL one).
Licencing spaguetti is real hard for users/admins to handle. Please do not mix multiple licenses in a single package - I hate to have to untangle such a mess manually.
Dual licensing is different. One can just choose his preferred license and forget about the other one.
In related news, I raised a similar bug against RPM just this week and yielded this:
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=126466
Quoting Jeff Johnson: "rpm has 3 licenses, GPL, LGPL, and X11. There's also another
license for embedded elfutils these days. [...] Yes, very confusing, can't be helped."
$ rpm -qi rpm [...] License: GPL
Now, RPM (the package) doesn't include a COPYING file, and the only real documentation on licensing in /usr/share/doc/rpm-<version> is:
$ grep -ri gpl /usr/share/doc/rpm-4.3.1/* CHANGES: under the LGPL builddependencies: gnome-libs-1.0.54-1::/usr/lib/libart_lgpl.so.2
I guess this dual licensing, or licensing of different parts of a package under different licenses is something the RPM design never really considered. The real question is, "is this field intended to be parsable?". If the answer is "it's not a hard requirement", then I think that "rpm -qi" should provide correct feedback; or at least feedback that isn't misleading. Either way, for packages which aren't licensed in a straight forward way, the conditions should be spelt out in a README.licensing (or similar) file in the documentation directory.
For my particular case, thanks to Jeff for clearing up my particular confusion. However, given this thread, there is a wider issue of how RPM (the packaging format) should report software that comes under two or more licenses though, and the problem has been around for a fair while.
Nathan.
