[Buildroot] [PATCH RFC] legal-info: add option to store manifest in rootfs

[Luca Ceresoli]

Hi,

On 27/04/2018 15:46, Thomas Petazzoni wrote:
> Yann, Florian,
> 
> On Thu, 26 Apr 2018 21:32:52 +0200, Yann E. MORIN wrote:
>> Some users want to be able to easily ship the manifest of the legal-info
>> directly in the target filesystem.
>>
>> Those users currently hack their ways around, usign a post-build script
>> that calls back to generate legal-info; this is a bit hackish...
>>
>> Add an option to that effect.
>>
>> Reported-by: Florian Fainelli <f.fainelli at gmail.com>
>> Signed-off-by: "Yann E. MORIN" <yann.morin.1998 at free.fr>
>> Cc: Florian Fainelli <f.fainelli at gmail.com>
>> Cc: Luca Ceresoli <luca at lucaceresoli.net>
>> Cc: Thomas Petazzoni <thomas.petazzoni at bootlin.com>
> 
> I'd like to challenge the usefulness of having the manifest on the
> target. What is the actual use case ?
> 
> Indeed, for license compliance of copyleft license (i.e at least GPL,
> LGPL), having the name of the software package, its version and its
> license is not sufficient, you also need to provide the full
> corresponding source code.

I think this is partially wrong. I also think the patch is partially
wrong. And I even think the entire world is partially wrong, but that's
another story. :)

GPL asks (in certain cases) to display the copyright notice and the
license (or a link to it) (more or less) (and remember IANAL:). Android
phones are a good esample of it: in the last item of the last menu entry
of some obscure app there is an insanely long cat of license texts. One
might want to do a similar thing on a device with a suitable GUI. I
think this is a reasonable way to be compliant, although there are other
ways.

Hence this patch makes sense to me, but it is insufficient. It should
also store the license text in the rootfs, in order for a GUI
application to be able to load that text and visualize it.

Providing the full corresponding source code is a different topic IMO.
It is allowed by the GPL that the device does not contain it, and there
are obvious techincal motivations not to do so. But the license (that
one must make available) states one has the right of asking and
receiving the code. Continuing with the above example, the Android
phones do not contain the full source code.

> So what is the need for having just the manifest ? Obviously the
> complexity of the patch is low, but it's yet another Config.in option,
> so I'd like to be sure there is a real, useful use case for it.

As I said the patch (with additions) would make sense. I'm not saying it
should be applied, but we should provide users with an alternative. Uhm,
maybe one can do 'make legal-info; cp <legal-stuff> ${ROOTFS}/usr/share'
in a post-build script?

-- 
Luca