[Nix-dev] Unfree package licenses

[Edward Tjörnhammar]

Hello everybody!

On Sat, Dec 07, 2013 at 12:53:55PM +0400, Michael Raskin wrote:
> >Yes, fixed. Should the absolute non free license also be added to lib/licenses? like:
> >```
> >idea_personal = {
> >   shortName ="IDEA Personal License";
> >   fullName = "IDEA Personal License";
> >   url ="https://www.jetbrains.com/idea/buy/personal_license.html":
> >}
> >```
> >Instead of just unfree? I.e. do we add non free licenses to lib/licenses in general?
>
> For free-of-charge non-free licenses this seems an interesting question
> to me, too.

So here are my thoughts/opinions on the subject.

Gentoo/Funtoo basically does this, i.e. if you add a line with some
atom "some-cat/unfree-pkg eula" to your system configuration that
means that you've read and accepted eula for unfree-pkg and that eula
has been added to /usr/portage/licenses, making the atom valid.

This make sense iff your system configuration/build-tools does these
kinds of checks. Since I'm still learning nix/nixos I wonder if it
would require a lot of work to add a configuration option to packages
w.r.t.  licenses?

I'm thinking along the lines of:

cat /etc/nixos/configuration.nix
...
      nix.package.unfree-pkg.license = "accept";
...

The attribute is most likely off but you get the idea.

Then nix-env and nixos-rebuild, probably some other nix-util which
isn't included in my current workflow, would refuse to build/install
the package without first accepting the license via the user/system
config.

Of course the mechanism above doesn't really need an index of unfree
package licenses. It's just that it would be nice to be able to point
the user to the uri of the actual license text. Intead of just telling
them to add "nix.package.unfree-pkg.license = \"accept\"" to their
system config.
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