License text in binary packages

[Michael Schwendt]

On Sun, 04 Sep 2005 23:37:32 -1000, Warren Togami wrote:

> Ralf Corsepius wrote:

> > If this legal requirement is as important as you seem to regard it, it
> > would be legally grossly negligible to RH not to update their packages,
> > ASAP.
> 
> Ralf has an important point here.  It is hypocritical to enforce this on 
> Extras when legal hasn't mandated that Core or RHEL must follow this rule.
>
> > 
> > However, as RH, other Linux distributors and package vendors ship their
> > packages without it for > 10 years, I am having strong doubts on FESCO
> > decision rsp. RH-legal's advice and its importance.
> 
> FESCO (and everyone here) is unqualified to make legal opinions, and I 
> really wonder if legal considered all information carefully when making 
> this recommendation.  Perhaps the recommendation was made in haste 
> because they are normally very busy.  I don't know the details of what 
> happened.

"Haste" sounds about right. Going back in the list archives, it looks like
Legal was asked about GNU GPL, not about any other MIT/BSD/whatever Open
Source licencing mix that's out there. More often than any other licence,
the GPL document is missing within source tarballs. Further, the general
"yes" to "inclusion of licence documents in binary packages" refers to any
source tarballs which include such licence files. I completely agree with
Ralf that it would not be feasible or legally correct for packagers to
create such licence files themselves in any cases where no such files
exist already. It would mean that packagers would need to verify whether
the licence chosen by the upstream developers is really
accurate/legal/compliant with all their source files and derived work.

> Does nobody else see this as a horribly hypocritical?  If Red Hat is 
> serious about enforcing this rule, then first mandate it on Core to lead 
> by example. 

+1

> Then everyone is forced to discuss the technical annoyances 
> like below:
> 
> How are we supposed to deal with cases where the source did not ship a 
> full copy of the license in order to add to %doc easily?  We are 
> supposed to add another copy of the license to each SRPM?

Do we have examples for this? (other than a missing GPL "COPYING" file)