[openbeos] Re: Haiku distro guidelines [was: Haiku VmwareBuild Environment]

On 2008-04-16 at 04:52:29 [+0200], Jorge G. Mare <koki@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> 
wrote:
> On Tue, 2008-04-15 at 21:47 -0400, Karl vom Dorff wrote:
> > Fair enough, though the disk images at Haiku-files.org don't have a
> > license attached with them. What about binutils, gdb included in the
> > operating system? Just like in my case, You can't call the whole thing
> > BSD/MIT. At best, mixed, with an explanation of the mixed licenses...
> 
> I believe you are right in that we would need to include the license
> text for each of them, something that apparently we have not been doing
> so far. In all honesty, I don't know why.

Some packages have the license built-in. Since gdb was mentioned: on 
startup it shows a short copyright notice and "show copying" will give you 
the complete GPL. Most command line tools (at least all GNU tools, I think) 
tell you how they are licensed when invoked with "--help" or "--version". 
For the GNU tools the printed text includes a URL to the GPL. Not sure if 
it is legally still required to include the license text for them.

Anyway, I think we should have a copy of every license text in a central 
directory and hyperlink the AboutSystem entries to them (i.e. open 
StyledEdit with the license text when clicked).

I'm not sure what to do with the optional package zips. All of them are 
results of a "make install", so one would think, that what is included is 
exactly what the copyright holders want you to include in a binary 
distribution. Some packages (e.g. automake, libtool, binutils/gcc) do 
include a copy of the license text, others don't. I think the packages 
should still end up in AboutSystem.

Using queries there might sound like a good idea for achieving that, but 
the current mechanism (querying for app signatures and use the version info 
attribute) is not sufficient, as it doesn't work for anything that doesn't 
have a signature or version info. Theoretically one could make up a 
signature for every package that comes with an executable and a version 
info, but since we only have to care about images created by the build 
system, I'd much rather just include a copyright/license description file 
with each and have the build system concatenate those and add them as an 
attribute to AboutSystem.

CU, Ingo

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