[Nix-dev] Re: Specifying licenses on Nix packages

[Sander van der Burg - EWI]

The semantics of a list of strings in my proposal is always disjunctive, so e.g.:

meta.license = [ "GPLv2+" "LGPLv2.1+" ];

means that the work is dual-licensed under the GPL version 2 or higher, or the LGPL version 2.1 or higher

For the gnutls example you gave, we should specify the licenses like this:

meta.subcomponents = {
  lib = {
    description = "GNU TLS library";
    license = "LGPLv3+";
  };
  cli = {
    description = "GNU TLS Command-Line interface";
    license = "GPLv3+";
  };
};

Which means that the package consists of two subcomponents. The CLI is available under the GPL version 3 or higher and the library under the LGPL version 3 or higher.

or maybe like this, if we are too lazy to identify all subcomponents and their licenses:

meta.license = "GPLv3+";

meta.subcomponents = {
  lib = {
    description = "GNU TLS library";
    license = "LGPLv3+";
  };
};

Which means that the whole package is available under the GPL version 3 or higher, except for the library subcomponent which is available under the LGPL version 3 or higher. (we even can have disjunctive licenses on subcomponents with this approach)

What do you think?

-----Original Message-----
From: nix-dev-bounces at cs.uu.nl on behalf of Ludovic Courtès
Sent: Mon 2/22/2010 4:24 PM
To: nix-dev at cs.uu.nl
Subject: [Nix-dev] Re: Specifying licenses on Nix packages
 
Hello Sander,

What are you replying to?

"Sander van der Burg - EWI"
<S.vanderBurg at tudelft.nl> writes:

> What I need now is consensus about license identifiers. If this
> consensus is ok to use, then I'll start modifying the incorrect
> license attributes when I encounter them.

Someone added a link to this page on the wiki:
<https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Licensing#SoftwareLicenses>.  The nice
thing is that it contains short names for many licenses, so it could
serve as a reference.

> The only thing I don't know yet is what Hydra does when the
> meta.license attribute is a list of strings instead of a list.

Sometimes one wants an 'and' (e.g., GnuTLS is LGPLv2+ but the
'gnutls-cli' program is GPLv3+), sometimes an 'or' (software that is
dual-licensed).  And that's for the simplest cases.  :-)

Thanks,
Ludo'.

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