A few days ago i started working on http://dev.haiku-os.org/ticket/1222 , "check if AboutHaiku lists an acknowledgment for all packages" I've done enough to learn I don't know which course of action to take in several cases : P Generally, there's three areas where acknowledgments must be accredited: source files, provided along with binary distributions, and advertising materials. For this task, I'm assuming the source files to be properly credited. Binary redistribution's credits could be placed somewhere in or alongside the included documentation and essentially need to be reproductions of the entire copyright and disclaimer block found in the source code. The credits for advertising materials seems to contain text that would also be appropriate for AboutHaiku. As far as I can tell, there is no specific requirement to include the text in AboutHaiku. I plan on creating two groups of text. One file that contains short blurbs to be used for advertising and optionally for AboutHaiku. An entire directory of individual text files of copyright notices. I'm not certain about the ideal hierarchy and nomenclature eg, legal/NetBSD.copyright , NetBSD.disclaimer, NewOS.copyright, NewOS.disclaimer, LGPL.copyright, LGPL.disclaimer eg, legal/NetBSD/copyright, disclaimer legal/LGPL/Copying, Now onto the questions ... Some files contain multiple versions of the same license. In these the acknowledgment quotes can differ. For eg, http://svn.berlios.de/svnroot/repos/haiku/haiku/trunk/src/libs/compat/freebsd_network/compat/sys/bus_dma.h Both copyrights are NetBSD and differ in the acknowledgment quote. * This product includes software developed by the NetBSD * Foundation, Inc. and its contributors. vs. * This product includes software developed by Christopher G. Demetriou * for the NetBSD Project. In this type of case, are we allowed the freedom to condense the latter quote into "and its contributors." of the first? Across multiple files, there may also be versions of the license that differs in the clauses. --currently i cannot re-locate examples of this. --but imagine lib/src1 has a NetBSD license with clauses 1,3, and 4 and lib/src2 with a NetBSD license with clauses 1,2,3 and 4. Would i need to reproduce each copyright notice individually or simply reproduce the one with more clauses? On a similar note, some groups use the same copyright notice for multiple years. Aside from that, the copyrights notices are exact duplicates. eg, lib/src4 has Copyright (c) 1997 ,lib/src5 has Copyright (c) 1998 , lib/src6 has Copyright (c) 2001 How would this situation be handled? reproduce the earliest date, the most recent, or create a custom "Multiple Copyright (c) through the years 1997 - 2001" -mmadia