Re: Preliminary OpenAFS 1.3.x RPM for Fedora Core 2

[Nathan Robertson <nathanr nathanr net>]

On 23/06/2004, at 12:01 AM, Nicolas Mailhot wrote:

> Le mar, 22/06/2004 à 09:37 -0400, Matthew Miller a écrit :
> > On Tue, Jun 22, 2004 at 08:47:53AM +0200, Arjan van de Ven wrote:
> > > > Very good point. I'll add that. Is there a Proper way to specify 
> > > > multiple
> > > > licenses in the license tag? "GPL and IPL", I guess? (As opposed to
> > > > "GPL/IPL" -- that'd be for dual-licensed, right? So annoying that 
> > > > IBM didn't
> > > > chose to just GPL this.)
> > > usually I do something like "parts GPL parts IPL" or so
> >
> > Hmmm; maybe even "IPL (OpenAFS) and GPL (kernel headers)" or "IPL; 
> > kernel
> > build trees GPL".
>
> Or even better two different packages with clearly defined licenses
> (with the IPL part depending on the GPL one).
>
> Licencing spaguetti is real hard for users/admins to handle. Please do
> not mix multiple licenses in a single package - I hate to have to
> untangle such a mess manually.
>
> Dual licensing is different. One can just choose his preferred license
> and forget about the other one.

In related news, I raised a similar bug against RPM just this week and 
yielded this:

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=126466

Quoting Jeff Johnson: "rpm has 3 licenses, GPL, LGPL, and X11. There's 
also another
license for embedded elfutils these days. [...] Yes, very confusing, 
can't be helped."

$ rpm -qi rpm
[...]
License: GPL

Now, RPM (the package) doesn't include a COPYING file, and the only 
real documentation on licensing in /usr/share/doc/rpm-<version> is:

$ grep -ri gpl /usr/share/doc/rpm-4.3.1/*
CHANGES:          under the LGPL
builddependencies:      gnome-libs-1.0.54-1::/usr/lib/libart_lgpl.so.2

I guess this dual licensing, or licensing of different parts of a 
package under different licenses is something the RPM design never 
really considered. The real question is, "is this field intended to be 
parsable?". If the answer is "it's not a hard requirement", then I 
think that "rpm -qi" should provide correct feedback; or at least 
feedback that isn't misleading. Either way, for packages which aren't 
licensed in a straight forward way, the conditions should be spelt out 
in a README.licensing (or similar) file in the documentation directory.

For my particular case, thanks to Jeff for clearing up my particular 
confusion. However, given this thread, there is a wider issue of how 
RPM (the packaging format) should report software that comes under two 
or more licenses though, and the problem has been around for a fair 
while.

Nathan.