Tom "spot" Callaway wrote:

On 03/18/2009 03:45 PM, Kevin Kofler wrote:

Simon Schampijer wrote:

Yes. So the main question is now if Fedora would be willing to ship
general licenses under /usr/share/common-licenses, I think.


I really don't want to do this. Here's why:

A) Many copyright holders make minor modifications to the licensing
terms. These modifications usually do not affect the rights granted by
the license (which is why we do not mark them as distinct and individual
licenses),

Perhaps this is a mistake on our part?

but it would be incorrect to have these packages pointing to
general license texts when those do not apply.

B) Many licenses require that any distribution include the license text.
Red Hat Legal was very uncomfortable with us using a rpm dependency to
meet that requirement.

Maybe it's because I'm not a lawyer, that I fail to see the problem with that.
As long as there exists some reference to the license and a location where it can be read,
doesn't that meet the requirements of those licenses?

It seems awfully wasteful carrying a million or more copies of the same blasted license file,
in a million or more locations in the OS.

Wasn't there a discussion, somewhat recently, about libraries that are shipped with the program instead
of being stored in /lib or /usr/lib?

Seems, to me, the arguments used to store such files in a *COMMON LOCATION* can, and should, be
used here.

Or has common sense been thrown out the window?

Lyos Gemini Norezel