Re: Why we must ship at least some licenses (was: Manoj, ...
On Mon, Aug 17, 1998 at 11:57:26AM +1000, Drake Diedrich wrote:
> On Mon, Aug 17, 1998 at 03:11:10AM +0200, Marcus Brinkmann wrote:
> > You have fulfilled your duty making it available in the same directory as
> > the rest of the source. However, for Debian, being a huge distribution, with
>
> Some shades of grey:
>
> 1) GPL is available on some ftp site or CD somewhere
> 2) GPL is on the same ftp site or CD set.
> 3) GPL is in the proposed verbatim/ directory
> 4) GPL is in the main/ directory
> 5) GPL is in the same directory
> 6) GPL is in the same tar archive
> 7) GPL is included in the same file
> 8) Through cryptographic magic the GPL is atomically attached to the
> package, making the package useless if the GPL is not also present.
>
> Current practice is 4.
Mmh. What I don't like about the current situation is that you can go to the
ftp site, download many (binary) packages and don't get a single license, until
someone tells you that it is (somewhat hidden) in the base files package. On
a Debian system (for example a Debian CD), I think the current situation is
good enough, considering that base-files is essential.
> Manoj is suggesting moving up a directory level
> to 3. Marcus is proposing we move to 6 when packaged, and 5 when unpacked.
A small correction: My proposal is to keep the current situation, and when
dpkg can manage several copies of the same file in several packages, we
should include the file /usr/doc/copyright/GPL in every GPL'ed package etc.
When unpacked on a Debian system, only one copy will ever be on the system,
so on a Debian system, the situation will be like now.
On the ftp site, we would ship the license with the software then.
If unpacked somewhere else, a copy is still available.
Currently, we don't have the technical functionality to achieve this, though,
and even I don't want 1500 copies of the GPL on every Debian installation
(although I could live with it on my system).
Thank you,
Marcus
--
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