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

[Rifenbark, Scott M]

Rudi,

I would like you to examine the "latest" documents (the ones under development).  I have added some new licensing information and would like your feedback for this upcoming version.  There are licensing discussions in both the latest versions of the BSP Guide and the reference manual.  Since, at the moment, the BSP Guide is included as a chapter in the reference manual, I'll point you to the latest version of the reference manual:

http://www.yoctoproject.org/docs/latest/poky-ref-manual/poky-ref-manual.html.


Thanks,
Scott

From: yocto-bounces at yoctoproject.org [mailto:yocto-bounces at yoctoproject.org] On Behalf Of Rudolf Streif
Sent: Monday, March 26, 2012 2:52 PM
To: yocto at yoctoproject.org
Subject: Re: [yocto] can all of the licensing discussion be centralized in an appendix?

>> 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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