Re: Question about multiple licenses

[Dave Love]

Ludovic Courtès <address@hidden> writes:

> Dave Love <address@hidden> skribis:
>
>> Alex Vong <address@hidden> 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.

> 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’.

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.