Bug#829667: License headers

[Jonas Smedegaard]

Quoting Sandro Mani (2016-07-05 11:43:22)
> Hi Jonathan

My name is Jonas (but not offended at all - not to worry :-) )


> For reviews, we have a tool (fedora-review) which runs licensecheck 
> recursively in the source tree. Fedora-review then prints out the 
> detected licenses in the license headers of the files and the 
> reviewer/packager is asked to compare these licenses with the actual 
> license declared by the project resp. in the package metadata (i.e. 
> the spec file).
> 
> So I suppose that typically people expect that each source file 
> contains a license header (from my point of view this also makes sense 
> if individual files are reused outside of the project). But it is not 
> a review-blocking issue, our guidelines simply ask us to raise the 
> issue upstream.

I disagree with your statement that "people expect that each source file 
contains a license header".

Im my understanding, people (in the FLOSS community at large) expect 
license statements to be explicit and included with the released project 
(rather than abbreviated or rerefenced from an online resource), and 
preferrably embedded in each source file.  CPAN projects generally, and 
the App::Licensecheck project specifically, embeds licensing statements 
in each source file, just not at the top which you seem to impose as a 
general expectation.

Thanks for elaborating on how Fedora uses licensecheck for quality 
assurance.  I appreciate your contacting upstreams to ensure that 
licensing statements are unambiguous and embedded in each file where 
copyright is claimed.  But instead of suggesting upstreams to conform to 
the more strict principle of putting licensing statements at the top of 
each file, I recommend that instead Fedora considers adjusting its 
quality assureance process to scan whole files instead of only the 
header.

If your point is a different one than I reflect on here, then please do 
elaborate.


Kind regards,

 - Jonas

-- 
 * Jonas Smedegaard - idealist & Internet-arkitekt
 * Tlf.: +45 40843136  Website: http://dr.jones.dk/

 [x] quote me freely  [ ] ask before reusing  [ ] keep private
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