Re: Question about multiple licenses

[ludo@gnu.org (Ludovic Courtès)]

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.

One can always view the COPYING file by running, say:

  tar xf $(guix build -S glibc) glibc-2.25/COPYING

This is of course suboptimal because the exact incantation varies from
package to package (in some cases there’s no such file.)

Thoughts?

Ludo’.