licence tag questions

[Hans de Goede]

Zoltan Kota wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I'm updating the License tag in the spec file of my packages. 
> 
> Checking the source files of 'recode' I found the following licenses:
> mostly GPLv2+, LGPLv2+, and in some files GNU Library General Public 
> License. 
> According to gnu.org the GNU Library General Public License has been 
> succeeded by the GNU Lesser General Public License. 
> 
> What should I use in the License tag??
> 

The license tag should represent the license of the binaries in a sub-package, 
so first you need you need to find out which binary gets build from which 
source files.

Usually when there are both GPL and LGPL licensed source files, there is both a 
lib and a few utilities. So you could have for example:

/usr/bin/foo, build from 5 GPLv2+ files and one LGPLv2+ file -> its GPLv2+
/usr/lib/libfoo.so.0, build from 3 LGPLv2+ files -> its LGPLv2+

Now if you both of these in the same package then the package gets:

License: GPLv2+ and LGPLv2+

As it has binaries under 2 different licences in the package

However it is recommended in this case to split of a -utils or a -libs, lets 
say you split of a -libs, then the main package tags (top of file) would have:
License: GPLv2+

Since the main package contains the GPL utils

And then further on:

%package libs
...
License: LGPLv2+



This split is both good to save diskspace when another package depends on the 
lib, and it will help the automatic license checker which is planned to be 
written to check cross package license issues.



> 
> 'pybliographer' is GPLv2+ but installs gnome documentation files with 
> GFDL. Should I use 'License: GPLv2+ and GFDL' in this case?
> 

Yes.

Regards,

Hans