Peter Cech posted <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, excerpted below, on Mon, 23 Jan 2006 01:00:11 +0100:
> What leads you to believe the license texts distributed in portage tree > are legaly binding with respect to the packages? Each packgage carries > (or at least should carry) its license embeded inside. In my > understanding, licanse pointers in ebuilds are purely informative and > allow you to check the terms of the license (and decide if the license > is acceptable) before you actually perform any legaly binding action > (like running 'emerge app-foo/bar'). One of the legal issues involved is that Gentoo normally strips the COPYING or similar files that would normally come with the package and be placed in /usr/share/doc/. The idea is that one copy of the GPLv2 (for example) on the system is enough. Thus, what the package carries is stripped out in favor of the Gentoo placeholder version, and the question is whether that placeholder version is then satisfactory from a legal standpoint, or not. The points made to date indicate that the old timers tend to be comfortable with the current situation, but nobody has provided a satisfactory legal reference or opinion that justifies this position. Just because it's been done that way for some time doesn't mean it's legally correct, and that's what's worrying to some posters (myself included, altho I'm not a Gentoo dev). -- Duncan - List replies preferred. No HTML msgs. "Every nonfree program has a lord, a master -- and if you use the program, he is your master." Richard Stallman in http://www.linuxdevcenter.com/pub/a/linux/2004/12/22/rms_interview.html -- gentoo-dev@gentoo.org mailing list
