Re: List of abbreviations for licenses

[Jeff Mickey <j@codemac.net>]

On Thu, Nov 29, 2012 at 2:05 PM, Ludovic Courtès <ludo@gnu.org> wrote:

> More importantly, licensing is not a science, and we can’t pretend to
> devise a universal “license calculus”.  (This has been discussed at
> length in the past on nix-dev.)
>
> Thus, I would start with a simple (guix licenses) module.  I would
> perhaps even omit the <license> type, and use just plain strings to
> start with.
>
> WDYT?

Unsolicited advice incoming..

Licenses are a huge pain when you get into all the custom ones out
there. This has also been discussed at length on arch-dev years ago.

IIRC ArchLinux uses an array of strings for each package, and then
when you build the package you get warnings about licenses that are
unique/new. You then add the LICENSE file to the package so the
warning goes away, and it gets placed in a common licenses directory.
I don't quite remember the mechanics of how it checked this, and I'm
sure it's changed by now.

I think the important part here is if you use strings, have some way
to check if someone is building a package with a new/undocumented
license. Then the graph of license objects could be accomplished
later, if you know you don't have misspellings like "LGLPv2" and stuff
like it polluting the graph.

  //  jeff