On 10/02/2013 01:42 PM, Thomas De Schampheleire wrote:
Hi,
The (L)GPL requires that every distribution of a derived work is
accompanied with the license of the program (xenomai-forge).
Currently, xenomai-forge contains several COPYING files:
./kernel/cobalt/nucleus/COPYING
./kernel/cobalt/COPYING
./kernel/cobalt/rtdm/COPYING
./include/COPYING
./lib/alchemy/COPYING
./lib/psos/COPYING
./lib/vxworks/COPYING
./lib/analogy/COPYING
./lib/cobalt/COPYING
./lib/copperplate/COPYING
An embedded build system like buildroot [1] has legal-info facilities
to mark for each package which license it uses, and where the license
files is located. A user can easily generate an overview of the
license information for all packages used in the system, and contains
almost everything necessary to comply with the (L)GPL. In buildroot,
this is done with 'make legal-info'.
In the case of buildroot, the license files are copied one by one in a
directory named after the package. This would essentially mean:
cp <xenomai-source>/kernel/cobalt/nucleus/COPYING licenses/xenomai/COPYING
cp <xenomai-source>/kernel/cobalt/COPYING licenses/xenomai/COPYING
cp <xenomai-source>/kernel/cobalt/rtdm/COPYING licenses/xenomai/COPYING
...
Clearly, the fact that all license files have the same name poses a
problem here. In order to have all files, one would either need to
rename them, or duplicate the directory structure.
Instead of moving this complexity outside of xenomai-forge (to the
build system), I would like to discuss how it can be solved within
xenomai-forge itself.
Well, using the position in the file system hierarchy as a mean to
disambiguate issues by giving them a specific scope is quite common. The
fact that buildroot can only cope with a flat namespace for licenses,
does not mean that any package buildroot integrates should agree or even
bother.
Here are two proposals:
1. Is it really necessary that there are multiple COPYING files? Is it
not possible to have one COPYING file in the root of the project, and
move the exception specified in include/COPYING to that file? This
approach is similar to many many other open-source projects.
Having the exception clause present in one particular file has a reason:
the legalese there is very much scoped, I didn't want it to apply to any
other part of the sources I once wrote. For this reason, moving it to
the toplevel would not make sense.
This said, such clause is on its way out though, after the recent
introduction of the LGPLd uapi/ header area, for sharing definitions
between kernel and userland.
> 2. Alternatively, what about renaming the license files to a unique
> name, e.g. COPYING.alchemy, COPYING.psos, COPYING.cobalt-nucleus ?
> Then, copying these files to one directory is possible without
overwriting.
Specifically, I would certainly not rename anything to COPYING.psos or
to whatever established trademark. Generally speaking, I'm not fond of
the idea of working around a buildroot shortcoming by reshuffling
headers or renaming them all through the Xenomai tree. I'll have to
meditate on this when I'm not grumpy.
--
Philippe.
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