Re: [PATCH 2/3] gnu: Add ledger.

[ludo@gnu.org (Ludovic Courtès)]

Leo Famulari <leo@famulari.name> skribis:

> On Sat, May 07, 2016 at 09:10:48PM -0500, Alex Griffin wrote:
>> On Sat, May 7, 2016, at 05:23 PM, Leo Famulari wrote:

[...]

>> > There are some GPL'd files in 'contrib/', 'lisp/', and 'python/res/'
>> > 
>> > The file 'tools/update_copyright_year' has an Expat license.
>> > 
>> > And, I think that unless we delete the bundled utfcpp, we are
>> > distributing it through `guix build --source ledger`, so we should
>> > mention its Boost license.
>> 
>> Is the license field for the source tarball or the package that actually
>> gets installed?
>
> Good question. Can anyone answer it?

It’s meant to be for the installed package.  In practice, we’ve often
encoded the license of the source files, usually a superset of the
licenses that apply to the installed software.

When specifying a list of licenses, make sure to add a comment saying
what the list means: if it’s a combination, a license choice, etc.

We should provide ways to express these different things at some point…

>> If it's the former, I have to say that's really
>> unintuitive. I was aware of these extra licenses, but none of that code
>> gets installed after you build the package. Note that emacs-ledger-mode
>> uses the same source tarball and I specified its license as GPL2+.
>> Instead of changing the license field in this patch, I added a note
>> about the other files to make it clear that changing the build options
>> may require the license field to change too. I can change it again if
>> that's wrong, but it seems to me that the license field should really be
>> about what gets installed.
>
> Good points. My original thought when bringing this up was that we also
> distribute the source code with `guix package --source`.

Right, but the source carries its own license anyway in ‘COPYING’, file
headers, etc.

So I sympathize with what Alex wrote.

Thoughts?

Ludo’.