Packages licenses

[Mike A. Harris]

On Fri, 7 Nov 2003, Xose Vazquez Perez wrote:

>> Having a flag like that is not likely, because some of the licenses may be
>> fine but not formally OSI-approved, and because the system used to build
>> the packages doesn't allow passing options such as -nocl.
>> 
>> You're right that there are many duplicates that could use fixing. Once it
>> is decided which license strings need to change, you can file patches in
>> bugzilla for all the ones that obviously need changing (e.g. s/Freely
>> distributable/Freely redistributable/i).
>
>the worse is that there are packages with *wrong* 'License' tag: ex. db4
>
>querida:~ $ rpm -q --qf '%{name}\t%{license}\n' db4
>db4     GPL
>
>/usr/share/doc/db4-4.0.14/LICENSE shows that it's BSD-alike
>
>_All package maintainers_ *should check* 'License' tag!!

I agree completely, however mistakes happen, and it's something
that can't be avoided.  It's a bug just like any other bug, so
file a bug report.


-- 
Mike A. Harris     ftp://people.redhat.com/mharris
OS Systems Engineer - XFree86 maintainer - Red Hat