NOTE: Please publicize any license changes to your packages

[Jeff Spaleta]

On 7/22/07, Thorsten Leemhuis <fedora at leemhuis.info> wrote:
> But what I'd like to see added at the same time are some automatic check
> to make sure properly done license changes get noticed automatically. A
> basic "sha1sum the LICENSE file from upstream (most ship one) once and
> put a small script into the %pre section that compares the know sha1sum
> with the current one from the tarball and aborts if something changed"
> should find properly done license changes automatically and keeps load
> off the maintainer.

That's actually a pretty good idea i think.  For a lot of packages...
packages that can easily define a set of license/copying files...this
sort of automatic file checking would help flag problems.  Granted its
not going to work for all packages, but it might help a lot in the
specific case of entire project codebases transitioning to gpl3 from a
previous license.  But I would definitely like to stress the need for
individual maintainers to keep watch as to what the upstream projects
are planning as for re-licensing and  communicate licensing changes to
the other fedora maintainers before they enter cvs/build system.

-jef