Hi Maxim and Sughosha, On 2026-05-26 at 15:19+09:00, Maxim Cournoyer wrote: > Sughosha <[email protected]> writes: > > On April 29, 2026 6:33:09 a.m. IST, Nguyễn Gia Phong wrote: > > > I understand the license as of what is distributed, so both. > > > By using origin-snippet you can remove the non-free files. > > > > > > I don't know how other interpret the meaning of that field though. > > > > I think we need to make this clear in our Guix manual. I see many > > packages that does not mention the licenses of unused examples > > (examples that are not built and installed but just are still present > > in the source). > > In my opinion, and what I think has been historically done in Guix, is > that the `licenses` field should first and foremost be the overall > license of the combined work. So if the work is licensed as GPLv3+ > globally, but that some example in the there in Expat or something else, > I think it's most useful to users that the licenses shown in 'guix show > the-package' says GPL 3+ rather than both GPL 3+ and Expat. > > There's no written rule though, so perhaps we should draft one? > The question has been asked enough time that it'd be worth > documenting our preferred practice, I think.
It wouldn't apply to unused examples, but if a (commonly referred to as) GPL-licensed work include some files or snippet under Expat, redistribution of such work still need to comply with the attribution clause of the Expat license (there must be a copy of the license text etc.). I don't think the end-users are (legally) concerned with free software licenses, so I've been associating the package-license field with redistributors (e.g. cache servers, developers running guix pack). For them/me/us, something like an SBOM (REUSE.toml-like) declaration would be more useful. Cheers, Phong
