[Bug 166254] Review Request: perl-Imager

[Warren Togami]

Ralf Corsepius wrote:
> 
> As any legal issues can not be taken easily, I do feel strong about it.
> 
> It's quite simple: Either legal requirements force us to ship verbatim
> copies or they don't. Setting up our own rules to fulfill non-existing
> laws doesn't help anybody.
> 
> AFAICT, there is no requirement to ship the license files:
> All the GPL does is to say (http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html#SEC4)
> 
> "You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
> along with this program; if not, write to the Free Software
> Foundation, Inc., 51 Franklin Street, Fifth Floor, Boston, MA  02110-1301, USA."
> 
> In my understanding, this does not imply authors MUST ship a copy of the
> GPL with their packages, they SHOULD, but also can do otherwise.
> 
> Also, AFAICT, according to US laws, shipping a detached License file is
> not considered legally binding and therefore is consider unsafe. The
> only safe way of licensing is to include license conditions to each
> source file (This is the reason why many GNU programs' sources such as
> GCC often are being systematically overhauled to include the correct
> licensing terms).
> 
> Applied to perl-modules, this would mean a sentence such as "same
> license as perl" inside of a perl file is legally more binding than a
> detached license, added by  would be.
> 
> Also I feel, a public discussion doesn't help ether. We need a lawyer to
> give a clear judgment if there is necessity to add license files to such
> packages or not.
> 

I very often disagree with Ralf's opinion, but I totally agree with the 
above.  I think we need legal clarification on this, because this is 
extremely silly to be forcing this on software that may already be 
compliant.

I generally think that all source files should ideally have their own 
copyright and license/permissions notice in order to help avoid 
ambiguity.  This however is not a blocker for inclusion if the work 
itself is clearly licensed.

> 
> 
>>Suggestion:
>>Why don't we do what Debian do and ship an "common licenses" package?
> 
> 
> IMO, this causes more hassle than directly copying license files,
> because licenses often vary in details.
> 

I disagree here.  The vast majority of software use the unmodified GPL 
or LGPL, and the packager could possibly recognize this and link it 
instead of including hundreds of duplicate copies that are different 
only in whitespace.

There are however problems in doing this...
- older distros wont have it, resulting spec deltas
- the license package will upgrade in the future, kinda messy to dep a 
newer version
- complication with "GPL v2 or later" and when GPLv3 comes...

This being said I don't particularly care much about this.  I analyzed 
the amount of RPM and install disk space that this would save sometime 
last year, and it wasn't worth the effort.  If you really care about 
saving as much space as possible when installing your RPM tree then use 
rpm --exclude-docs.

I tried to make it so no software runtime or buildtime is broken by 
missing %doc files.  If you find any case however where it causes 
breakage, file a bug and CC me.

Warren Togami
wtogami at redhat.com