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From: ludo@gnu.org (Ludovic Courtès)
To: Dave Love <fx@gnu.org>
Cc: guix-devel@gnu.org
Subject: Re: Question about multiple licenses
Date: Sun, 10 Sep 2017 22:54:35 +0200	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <87zia246lw.fsf@gnu.org> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <874lseqy4m.fsf@albion.it.manchester.ac.uk> (Dave Love's message of "Thu, 07 Sep 2017 17:20:09 +0100")

Dave Love <fx@gnu.org> skribis:

> Ludovic Courtès <ludo@gnu.org> writes:
>
>> Dave Love <fx@gnu.org> skribis:
>>
>>> Alex Vong <alexvong1995@gmail.com> writes:
>>>
>>>> Based on the above general argument, I think we should list all the
>>>> licenses instead of just GPLv2+ since it would be inaccurate to say that
>>>> the whole program is under just GPLv2+.
>>>
>>> Indeed.  Not only do you need to list the licences (according to all
>>> "legal advice" I've seen for distributions), but normally also
>>> distribute the relevant licence texts, even for permissive licences if
>>> they require that (e.g. BSD).  I raised this recently, as it's not
>>> generally being done, so some Guix binary packages appear to be
>>> copyright-infringing.
>>
>> There’s no such thing as a “Guix binary package” though, which makes it
>> different from traditional distros.
>>
>> In Guix a package is a Scheme object that refers to the source and build
>> method of upstream software.
>
> Sure, but if you use guix pack and distribute the result, it seems
> clearly a copyright infringement, because even BSD requires
>
>   2. Redistributions in binary form must reproduce the above copyright
>      notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer in the
>      documentation and/or other materials provided with the distribution.

[...]

> Well, from what I know about copyright, that isn't the licence of glibc,
> which is the sum of all the licences involved, and you'd have to know
> how to find them if you didn't just unpack the tarball.  With pack
> output in a lot of cases you don't have the information.

Right, ‘guix pack’ makes things more complicated—although I would argue
that, contrary to Dockerfiles and the like (which nobody seems to
complain about), Guix makes it easier to do provenance tracking since
there’s an unambiguous source → binary mapping.

How do Debian and Fedora determine the relevant files to copy?  We could
investigate ways to do that, but it won’t scale unless we have a mostly
automated way to do it.

(It won’t scale to the size of Stackage, CPAN, Pypi, etc. either…)

Thoughts?

Ludo’.

  reply	other threads:[~2017-09-10 20:54 UTC|newest]

Thread overview: 16+ messages / expand[flat|nested]  mbox.gz  Atom feed  top
2017-08-26  7:40 Question about multiple licenses Arun Isaac
2017-08-28 10:45 ` Alex Vong
2017-08-28 17:25   ` Arun Isaac
2017-08-28 17:29     ` Efraim Flashner
2017-08-29  6:30       ` Arun Isaac
2017-09-01 11:43   ` Dave Love
2017-09-02 16:54     ` Alex Vong
2017-09-07 16:21       ` Dave Love
2017-09-03 11:45     ` Arun Isaac
2017-09-04 14:57     ` Ludovic Courtès
2017-09-07 16:20       ` Dave Love
2017-09-10 20:54         ` Ludovic Courtès [this message]
2017-09-11 11:29           ` Alex Vong
2017-09-11 12:45             ` Andy Wingo
2017-09-12 22:15               ` Dave Love
2017-09-12 22:13           ` Dave Love

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