[yocto] can all of the licensing discussion be centralized in an appendix?

[Rudolf Streif]

>
> >> there's *way* too much coverage of licensing sprinkled throughout.
> >> most people are not going to care about licensing until the time comes
> >> to maybe start distributing their BSP.
>
> The ability of collecting licensing information, tracking license changes
and providing the license information automatically with the images and
packages for deployment is in my opinion a major feature of Yocto albeit
underestimated. Most people will only appreciate it once they have to
deliver that information with a product for the end user. However, it
starts much earlier, with the recipe.

How to include licensing tracking information with your recipe needs to be
part of the section explaining how to write recipes of the reference
manual. In both, the current 1.1 and the upcoming 1.1.1, versions of the
manual the license tracking section is a little disjoint from the sections
explaining how to add packages/recipes in my opinion. The examples include
the license tracking info, of course because otherwise the sanity checker
will not allow building the recipe, but they don't explain that you
actually need it (unless you use LICENSE = "CLOSED").

Since the license tracking and deployment feature follows the rule "garbage
in, garbage out" the manual cannot stress enough providing the correct info
in particular when writing recipes for upstream projects.

Side note: And nice features for a future release are SPDX info (already
worked on as far as I know) and providing the license info in
${TMPDIR}/deploy/licenses according to the images in ${TMPDIR}/images so
that one knows what licenses are in use for what image. That would be very
convenient when building multiple images with different package content.

Rudi
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