Re: How to determine all licenses involved?
2010/10/24 Stefan Baur <newsgroups.mail2@stefanbaur.de>:
> I just tried to generate a list of all these files, and the number of files
> named "copyright" in these directories is lower than the number of installed
> packages. (I compared the output of dpkg --get-selections|wc -l, which
> returns "332", and find /usr/share/doc -iname "*copyright*"|wc -l, which
> returns "320"). It seems that some directories are actually symlinks [...]
That's correct, copyright packages for binary packages generated from
the same source package may use symlinks to avoid repeating them.
> So I tried find -L /usr/share/doc -iname "*copyright*"| wc -l, which
> returns "791", so something here is very wrong.
That command finds false positives, "cd /usr/share/doc; find * -iname
"copyright" | wc -l" would be a better try.
> Can I at least safely assume that every free Debian package has a file
> "copyright", or a symlink pointing at another copyright file, as in "having
> such a file is mandatory for being accepted into mainline Debian"?
Yes. See http://www.debian.org/doc/debian-policy/ch-source.html#s-dpkgcopyright.
> If that is true, I could generate a list of all these files, generate an MD5
> checksum over each, and eliminate duplicates of those with an identical
> checksum.
That won't work, copyright files also include information such as all
copyright owner's names (including that of the packager) and copyright
years, the location where the original source tarball was obtained,
etc.
> I'm not worried that a non-free license slipped through, but I do want to be
> able to provide a complete list of all the licenses involved in my standard
> installation. Saying "go look them up yourself" to my potential customers
> isn't exactly professional behavior, that's why I'm trying to compile a
> list. ;-)
--
Siegfried-Angel Gevatter Pujals (RainCT)
Free Software Developer 363DEAE3
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