On Fri, May 05, 2017 at 02:28:34PM -0400, Randy Barlow wrote:
I liked Miro's suggestion of hardlinking the licenses, but
it's
important to sure they are actually identical with checksums (i.e.,
don't just use the License field because what if the upstream project
subtly adjusted the license file?)
Right, it would be necessary for someone maintaining a package to
verify that what looks like a common license actually matches the
reference copy. (I don't know if Debian does this.) In some cases,
non-identical files could be determined nonetheless to match according
to some criteria. As an example, the GitHub 'choose-a-license' feature
seems to be resulting in a class of noncanonical common license texts
that differ from the real authentic copy only in nonsubstantive ways
(e.g. whitespace).
Richard